The term most commonly used for a string instrument in the Iliad and Odyssey (written between 850 and 750 bce but preserving stories from oral tradition about events from the Mycenaean period, over 400 years earlier). The word is also found in Archaic period texts such as the Homeric hymns. It is still seen in early 5th-century literature, but in works from the end of that century it is seldom found.
The phorminx of the Mycenaean Greeks, as works of art attest, was a lyre (Chordophone) with a shallow wooden soundbox with a rounded base, similar in most details to the earlier lyre of Minoan Crete and, like it, having two arms that often curved in and out in an ornamental fashion, supporting a crossbar to which seven strings were fixed with leather strips (kollopes) for friction. The instrument was held upright, and played in the same manner as the later Kithara.
The same shape and mode of playing are seen in the art of the Geometric period (c1100–800 bce), although the arms are sometimes straight, and only a few strings are shown (for artistic reasons; the actual number probably did not change). Although other types of lyre begin to be found in works of art from about 800 bce, the phorminx (with straight arms, its seven strings again visible) is still seen more often and in more locations than other lyres until the end of the 7th century.
Representations of the phorminx made between 600 and 525 bce are much less common than those of the kithara or chelys lyra, and are from areas as distant as Greek Asia Minor, Rhodes, Egypt and Etruscan Italy as well as from Athens. But the phorminx appears in over 40 representations from the late 6th century and throughout the 5th, mostly on Athenian vase paintings.
From the 7th century, pairs of bosses or circles were often painted on the soundbox, and after 475 bce these were sometimes turned into eyes; no other lyre has this apotropaic feature. The arms, early and late, were often decorated, though in ways that changed markedly.
Homer and the writers of the Archaic era described the phorminx as the instrument of Apollo, who sometimes played it to the singing of the Muses; in the early 5th century Pindar spoke of it as owned by Apollo and the Muses. In fact the kithara had long since replaced the phorminx as Apollo’s instrument, but the Muses inherited it: they play it in some half-dozen 5th-century vase paintings. Other female figures, mythological and mortal, also play the phorminx. Both Homer and the Archaic period writers mentioned it in connection with dancing; in the 5th century Bacchylides and Pindar also placed it in the context of dancing, as do scenes on a substantial group of vase paintings.
B. Aign: Die Geschichte der Musikinstrumente des Ägäischen Raumes bis um 700 vor Christus (Frankfurt, 1963)
M. Wegner: Greichenland, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/4 (Leipzig, 1963, 2/1970)
M. Wegner: ‘Musik und Tanz’, Archaeologia Homerica, iii (1968), 3–18
M. Maas: ‘The Phorminx in Classical Greece’, JAMS, ii (1976), 34–55
M. Maas and J.M. Snyder: Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven, CT, 1989)
MARTHA MAAS