TERPANDER, the father of Greek music and of lyric poetry, flourished at the town of Antissa, in Lesbos, somewhere between 700 B.C. and 650 B.C. It has been set down hitherto with confidence by historians (see particularly K. O. Muller in his Literature of Anc. Greece, and Grote, History of Greece, vol. iv.), as a well ascertained fact, that the victor at the Spartan festival of Carneia, was Terpander, and that this occurred in 676 B.C. (Ath., xiv.) But it has been acutely argued, by a writer in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biog. and Mythology, that too much certainty has been attached to this point of time in the midst of the surrounding chronological obscurity. Born of a musical race, and born in a musical city, for here was the grave of the mythical and musical Orpheus, Terpander was, besides, possessed of a true genius for
simple lyrics, and for the harmony of their utterance by the human voice in the form of song. His was the first orderly brain of sufficient power that undertook to bind down, under the rigour of rules, the floating airs of the different provinces of Greece and of Asia Minor. His musical success seems to have been nearly as great as the success which attended the Homeric poems. Curious circumstance this, that the first poet and the first musician of whom any record remains, should have been the best poet and the best musician in all history. Terpander removed from Lesbos to Sparta, where he set up the first musical school hitherto known in Greece. The compass of the lyre was enlarged by him from a tetrachord to an octave. Almost all we know of his musical labours is, that he exercised himself for the most part with citharœdic nomes (νόμοι). He set his own verses and those of Homer to fixed tunes, which he chanted on the harp at the musical contests of Greece. Whether or not he employed the flute as a means of harmonical expression is doubtful. Neither is it certain whether he invented any kind of musical notation in which to preserve his tunes after he was gone. The music of Terpander remained long famous throughout Greece; and as he was the first to gain the prize at the musical festival of Carneia, his descendants seem to have resolved that so high an honour should not pass lightly out of their school. The musicians of Terpander were, accordingly, famous for many centuries after his death. Only a few fragments now remain to attest the simple elegance of the religious songs of Terpander. These will be found in the second volume of Bode's Geschichte der Lyrische Dichtkunst der Hellenen.