This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
The same thing was done also by the tragedians.
For the tragedians have never to this day used either the
chromatic or the enharmonic scale; while the lyre, many
generations older than tragedy, used them from the very
beginning. Now that the chromatic was more ancient
than the enharmonic is plain. For we must necessarily
account it of greater antiquity, according to the custom and
use of men themselves; otherwise it cannot be said that
[p. 117]
any of the differences and distinctions were ancienter
the one than the other. Therefore, if any one should
allege that Aeschylus or Phrynichus abstained from the
chromatic out of ignorance, would he not be thought to
maintain a very great absurdity? Such a one might as well
aver that Pancrates lay under the same blindness, who
avoided it in most, but made use of it in some things;
therefore he forebore not out of ignorance, but judgment,
imitating Pindar and Simonides and that which is at present
called the ancient manner.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 1.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.