ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Concerning Music 20 Concerning Music, Plutarch; served verbatim
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 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.

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

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)