Abstract
About A.D. 400 the historian Olympiodorus, surveying the contemporary state of culture with a perhaps conventional sigh of nostalgia for a vanished silver age, wrote that “Of the other liberal arts, such as arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, there are a few remains left to our time. But of music even its fame is not known to us. We have books on musical theory but we do not understand them”. Much the same had been said by Aristoxenus some seven centuries previously, which suggests that as far as the ancient world, at least, is concerned, any attempt at reconstructing the music of Greece can never be more than hypothetical and subjective. This does not mean that valuable information cannot be sifted from ancient texts and archaeological evidence, and the number of studies cited over a 25-year period by Winnington-Ingram testifies to the continuing interest of the subject despite its intrinsic limitations.
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