(Gk.: ‘three-cornered’).
A term for the Greek Harp (a Chordophone). It is the least ambiguous of the names used for this instrument, the other terms for which include Pēktis, Magadis, Sambuca and Psaltery. Associating any of these terms with a specific type of harp is difficult, as there seems to have been no consistency of usage among the Greeks themselves. Indeed, as Maas and Snyder have suggested, the term trigōnon, which originated only in the 5th century bce, may have been coined as a generic term ‘for various instruments that bore foreign names and were still relatively unfamiliar to Athenian (if not Eastern) Greeks’.
The Greek harp, which generally took the form of an angular harp as opposed to the arched harp of the Egyptians, appears in three types. By far the most common is the open ‘vertical angular’ harp (see illustration). The neck of the instrument is the horizontal member, resting on the knee of the seated player. The resonator is the vertical member, rising at an angle away from the body of the player to about the height of the head, where it frequently hooks forwards. Sometimes it grows thicker towards the top, thus affording greater resonance to the longer strings. Harps are generally depicted with considerably more strings than lyres and kitharas; a range of at least two octaves was probably not uncommon. The strings extended vertically, with the shorter strings closer to the body of the player. They were probably tuned similarly to those of the lyra and kithara; representations of the harp show protuberances on the post which may represent kollopes (see Lyra(i), §2). The second type of Greek harp is a less common variant of the first – the so-called frame harp, which has a supporting forepillar extending from the ends of the resonator and neck. The third type is the comparatively rare ‘spindle’ harp, an instrument with a resonator that is wider in the middle and narrower at the ends; the resonator of this type is usually depicted away from the player.
Players of Greek harps are generally depicted as females, both amateur and professional. They play the instruments by plucking them with the thumb and forefingers of both hands, usually with the left hand extending further outwards to the longer strings. That harps were played by plucking with the fingers (psallein) as opposed to ‘striking’ (kruein) with the plectrum gave rise to the later term for the harp psaltērion. Similarly derived is the term psaltria, a female harpist, although this term came to be used for female string players in general.
The angular harp was known to the pre-Greek inhabitants of the Cyclades, as attested by a number of marble statuettes dating from the period about 2800–2300 bce that depict a male figure playing a frame harp. There is, however, no more evidence of harps in the Aegean area until the appearance of several references to the instrument in the poetry of 6th-century Eastern Greek authors such as Alcaeus, Anacreon and Sappho. These writers generally use the term pēktis and associate it with Lydia. Harps came to be mentioned in Athens in the 5th century and are pictured with some frequency in Attic vase paintings of the second half of the century, but not nearly so often as lyres and kitharas. Harps of the period retained their foreign associations and are among the instruments that Plato and Aristotle excluded from their ideal states.
See also Greece, §I, 5(iii)(b).
R. Herbig: ‘Griechische Harfen’, Mitteilungen des Deutschen archäologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung, liv (1929), 164–93
M. Maas and J.M. Snyder: Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven, CT, 1989), 147–55, 181–5
M.L. West: Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), 70–78
T.J. Mathiesen: Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1999), 275–80
JAMES W. McKINNON