Plut. Mor., Concerning Music 18 — Concerning Music

Plut. Mor., Concerning Music 18 — Concerning Music, Plutarch; served verbatim

Moreover, the ancients well understood all the sorts of styles, although they used but few. For it was not their ignorance that confined them to such narrow instruments and so few strings ; nor was it out of ignorance that Olympus and Terpander and those that came after them would not admit of larger instruments and more variety of strings. This is manifest from the poems of Olympus and Terpander and all those that were their imitators. For, being plain and without any more than three strings, these so far excelled those that were more numerously strung, insomuch that none could imitate Olympus's play ; and they were all inferior to him when they betook themselves to their polychords.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Olympus — a candidate entry

Concerning Music, Plutarch — translated by John Philips (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)