(fl c675 bce). Lyric poet of Lesbos. He became famous in the musical life of Sparta during its brief period of brilliance. According to a late tradition, he had been brought to Sparta at a time of public discontent, which he quieted through his music. Only this minor episode links him with the Greek belief in the power of musical ethos. His importance consists rather in his having been an innovator, the first significant and credible figure in the early history of Greek music.
Terpander's most remarkable achievement was the successful introduction of the seven-stringed lyre. In one fragment of his verse (Campbell, frag.6), he described the revolutionary change by which it supplanted the four-stringed phorminx, familiar since the Homeric period. According to the Aristotelian Problems (xix.32), Terpander tuned this lyre so that the seven strings would span an octave. Elsewhere (Campbell, frag.7), Terpander associated Spartan valour and music, as did Alcman a generation later. The authenticity of the surviving fragments, however, has been called into question. In later sources, he was credited with having introduced a new type of composition, the lyric Nomos, which according to Pollux (Onomasticon, iv.66) was comprised of seven parts: eparcha, metarcha, katatropa, metakatatropa, omphalos, sphragis and epilogos. As in the case of aulos nomoi, to which an even earlier origin was ascribed, later generations remembered the melody rather than the sung text. Terpander is also credited with the invention of the Skolion (Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music, 1140f), and he was thought to be the first to make lyric settings (almost certainly monodic, like the nomos) of epic hexameters, not only those of Homer but his own as well. These, with their settings for lyre, constituted the prooimion or prelude prefacing recitations of Homer (Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music, 1132c–1134f).
D.L. Page, ed.: Poetae melici graeci (Oxford, 1962)
D.L. Page, ed.: Lyrica graeca selecta (Oxford, 1965)
D.A. Campbell, ed. and trans.: Greek Lyric, ii (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1988), 294–319
L. Deubner: ‘Terpander und die siebensaitige Leier’, Berliner philologische Wochenschrift, l (1930), 1566–7
O.J. Gombosi: Tonarten und Stimmungen der antiken Musik (Copenhagen, 1939/R), 40–48, 73–7
B.A. van Groningen: ‘A-propos de Terpandre’, Mnemosyne, 4th ser., viii (1955), 177–91
J. Chailley: ‘Nicomaque, Aristote et Terpandre devant la transformation de l'heptacorde grec en octocorde’, Yuval, i (1968), 132–54
J. Lohmann: ‘Der Ursprung der Musik’, Musiké und Logos: Aufsätze zur griechischen Philosophie und Musiktheorie zum 75. Geburtstag des Verfassers, ed. A. Giannarás (Stuttgart, 1970), 27–87
A. Gostoli: ‘Terpandro e la funzione etico-politica della musica nella cultura spartana del VII sec. a.C’, La musica in Grecia: Urbino 1985, 231–7
For further bibliography see Greece, §I.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN