a celebrated Greek poet and musician. The Oxford marbles tell us that he was the son of Derdeneus of Lesbos, and that he flourished in the 381st year of these records; which nearly answers to the 27th Olympiad, and 671st year B. C. The marbles inform us likewise, that he taught the nomes, or airs, of the lyre and flute, which he performed himself upon this last instrument, in concert with other players on the flute. Several writers tell us that he added three strings to the lyre, which before his time had but four; and in confirmation of this, Euclid and Strabo quote two verses, which they attribute to Terpander himself.

The tetrachord's refrain we now defise, The seven-string'd lyre a nobler strain supplies.

Among the many signal services which Terpander is said to have done to music, none was of more importance than the notation that is ascribed to him for ascertaining and preferring melody, which before was traditional, and wholly dependent on memory. The invention, indeed, of musical characters has been attributed by Aby- pius and Gaudenius, two Greek writers on music, and upon their authority by Boethius, to Pythagoras, who flourished full two centuries after Terpander. But Plutarch, from Heraclides of Pontus, assures us that Terpander, the inventor of nomes for the cithara, in hexameter Terpander, hexameter verse, set them to music, as well as the verses of Homer, in order to sing them at the public games: And Clemens Alexandrinus, in telling us that this musician wrote the laws of Lycurgus in verse, and set them to music, makes use of the same expression as Plutarch; which seems clearly to imply a written melody.

After enumerating the airs which Terpander had composed and to which he had given names, Plutarch continues to speak of his other compositions; among which he describes the proems, or hymns for the cithara, in heroic verse. These were used in after-times by the rhapsodists, as prologues or introductions to the poems of Homer and other ancient writers. But Terpander rendered his name illustrious, no less by his performances upon the flute and cithara than by his compositions. This appears by the marbles already mentioned; by a passage in Athenaeus, from Hellanicus, which informs us that he obtained the first prize in the musical contests at the Carnean games; and by the testimony of Plutarch, who says, that "no other proof need be urged of the excellence of Terpander in the art of playing upon the cithara, than the register of the Pythic games, from which it appears that he gained four prizes successively at those solemnities." Of the works of this poet only a few fragments now remain.