(Gk.; Lat. pandura).
An instrument generally identified with the Greco-Roman Lute (it is generally classified as a Chordophone). Lutes made a late entry into the Greco-Roman world, not appearing until after Alexander’s Persian conquest. They are represented chiefly on a fairly small number of Greek terracottas and Roman sarcophagi. Organologists distinguish two types among these lutes: one with a roughly rectangular soundbox that is clearly demarcated from the neck, and one with an almond-shaped soundbox that merges with the neck. The instruments are generally pictured played by a female figure (or by Eros) stopping the strings with her left hand and plucking them, often by plectrum, with her right. Pollux referred to the pandoura as trichordon (‘three-string’), but the sculpted lutes show varying, if small, numbers of strings. Perhaps it is best simply to say that the instruments had fewer strings than either the kithara or the harp.
There was considerable confusion, particularly among later authors, about the identification of the pandoura. Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville described it as a wind instrument invented by the god Pan, and the Suda identified it with the Pēktis, a type of harp. More helpfully, Pollux vaguely associated it with the monochord, and Nicomachus actually confused the two instruments; in fact the monochord, with its long narrow fingerboard, is closely related to the lute. ‘Pandoura’ and the related ‘tanbur’ are names for lutes found today from the Balkans to the Middle East, and the term ‘bandurria’ is also derived from ‘pandoura’.
See also Greece, §I, 5(iii)(b).
G. Fleischhauer: Etrurien und Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1964, 2/1978)
R.A. Higgins and R.P. Winnington-Ingram: ‘Lute-Players in Greek Art’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, lxxxv (1965), 62–71
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967)
M. Maas and J.M. Snyder: Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven, CT, 1989), 185–6
M.L. West: Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), 79–80
T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 283–5
JAMES W. McKINNON