(fl Athens, c450–420 bce). Greek kitharode and composer of nomoi. None of his works has survived. He went to Athens from Lesbos (c450 bce) and had already become well known by 423; in that year Aristophanes (Clouds, 969–70 and scholium) deplored the difficult vocal writing that contemporary composers had learnt from him. About half a dozen years later, Timotheus boasted of a victory over Phrynis and called him ton Iōnokamptan, ‘the Ionian [decadent] bender’ (Edmonds, frag.20). As in Aristophanes’ dyskolokamptous, there is a reference to kampai (literally ‘bends’) in the melodic line; at times writers applied the term to metrical structure as well. After a century, however, Aristotle's pupil Phaenias of Eresus named Phrynis and Timotheus alike as examples of classical excellence (Athenaeus, xiv, 638b); and Aristotle himself, or a member of his school, said of the two poets that the one would not have been possible without the other (Metaphysics, i.1, 993b16; of disputed authorship).
According to Pseudo-Plutarch's On Music (1133b), Phrynis complicated kitharoedic techniques by varying the mode and metre. He was contemporary with the renowned Theban aulete Pronomus, supposedly the first to play all the modes on one and the same double aulos. The tradition that he had been a singer to the aulos before he learnt the kithara (scholiast on Aristophanes, above) may merit serious consideration. Proclus (Useful Knowledge, in Photius, Bibliotheca, 320a33), writing about 450 ce, stated that Phrynis had revolutionized the nomos by combining the hexameter with a free metre and using more than seven strings (chordai). According to Plutarch (On Progress in Virtue, 83e–84b; Sayings of the Spartans, 220c), Phrynis added two strings, but when he attempted to introduce his innovations to Sparta, Ekprepes the Ephor removed two of them, admonishing him not to ‘murder music’. A similar story is told of Timotheus (Ancient Customs of the Spartans, 238c–d; Boethius, De institutione musica, i.1).
The strongest evidence comes from the Cheiron, a fragment of the Old Comedy of the later 5th century bce; preserved in Pseudo-Plutarch's On Music (1141d–1142a), it is the lament of Music (mousikē), personified as a woman, who has suffered various outrages at the hands of modern composers (see Pherecrates, Melanippides). Phrynis, she declares, inserted his own spinning-top (strobilon), bending and twisting her to total corruption with 12 harmoniai (dōdech' harmonias) in his five strings (pentachordois). The sexual imagery of the entire fragment is reasonably clear; strobilos must therefore have been a term both of sexual slang and of technical musical meaning. In the former context, it may refer to the olisbos, a leather phallus (see Anderson, p.132); no convincing hypothesis has yet been presented for its musical meaning. It is nevertheless evident that in the history of kitharoedic composition the Greeks ranked Phrynis second only to Timotheus as a revolutionary.
J.M. Edmonds, ed. and trans.: Lyra graeca, iii (London and Cambridge, MA, 1927, 2/1928/R), 267–8
W. Riemschneider: ‘Phrynis’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xx/1 (Stuttgart, 1941), 925–30
G. Pianko: ‘Un comico contributo alla storia della musica greca: Chirone di Ferecrate’, Eos, liii (1963), 56–63
E.K. Borthwick: ‘Notes on the Plutarch De musica and the Cheiron of Pherecrates’, Hermes, xcvi (1968), 60–73
M.L West: ‘Analecta musica’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, xcii (1992), 28–9
D.A. Campbell, ed. and trans.: Greek Lyric, v (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993), 62–9
W.D. Anderson: Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 127–34
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN