According to Greek tradition, the first treatise ‘On music’ (Peri mousikês) was that of Lasus of Hermione, the eminent musician and musicologist of the late sixth century. Prior to this, of course, Greece enjoyed a flourishing and highly refined musical culture, both in the melic poetry of the Archaic period and the epic tradition which reached its last great flowering with the Ionic or ‘Homeric’ school. Clearly the practitioners of these earlier styles were able to communicate to each other, and to their students, the essentials of their technê. Therefore, prior to Lasus—or whoever was first to write on the subject—there existed in oral tradition a ‘technical’ musical vocabulary. Some of these words may have persisted, changed or unchanged, into the Classical and later periods. Naturally, this continuity would have been most evident in the earliest written works; unfortunately, no treatises have survived from the two centuries which separate Lasus from the (substantially extant) Elementa Harmonica of Aristoxenus in the late fourth century.

In this paper I attempt to illuminate this lost language with evidence drawn from archaic Greek poetry, and especially epic diction. The material is largely indirect, of course, since none of the poems purports to be a technical treatise. And yet the poets appear to have employed ‘fragments’ of their professional vocabulary in the not-infrequent passages which have music as their theme

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