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Encyclopedia Britannica



EPIGONION (Gr. errcryovewv)

This article appears in Volume V09, Page 690 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: EMS-EUD
EPIGONION (Gr. errcryovewv) , an ancient stringed
instrument
  mentioned in Athenaeus 183 C, probably a psaltery. The epigonion was invented, or at least introduced into
Greece
 , by Epigonus, a Greek musician of Ambracia in Epirus, who was admitted to citizenship at Sicyon as a recognition of his
great
  musical ability and of his having been the first to
pluck
  the strings with his fingers, instead of using the plectrum.' The
instrument
 , which Epigonus named after himself, had
forty
  strings.2 It was undoubtedly a kind of harp or psaltery, since in an instrument of so many strings some must have been of different lengths, for tension and thickness only could hardly have produced
forty
  different sounds, or even twenty, supposing that they were arranged in pairs of unisons. Strings of varying lengths require
1 Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, torn. 1, c. 13, p. 380: Salomon van Til, Sing-Dicht and Spiel-Kunst, p. 95.
2 Pollux, Onomasticon, lib. iv. cap. 9, 59.
EPIGONION
a
frame
  like that of the harp, or of the Egyptian cithara which had one of the arms supporting the
cross
  bar or zugon shorter than the other,' or else strings stretched over harp-shaped bridges on a sound-board in the case of a psaltery. Juba II., king of Mauretania, who reigned from 30 B.C., said (ap. Athen. l.c.) that Epigonus brought the instrument from Alexandria and played upon it with the fingers of both hands, not only using it as an accompaniment to the voice, but introducing chromatic passages, and a chorus of other stringed
instruments
 , probably citharas, to accompany the voice. Epigonus was also a skilled citharist and played with his bare hands without plectrum? Unfortunately we' have no record of when Epigonus lived. Vincenzo Galilei3 has given us a description of the epigonion accompanied by an
illustration
 , representing his conception of the ancient instrument, an upright psaltery with the outline of the clavicytherium (but no keyboard). (K. S.)


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