How the Perfect System became a standard we cannot tell; it probably grew slowly, as the compass of the various instruments increased. It comprised two octaves, a'—A. The foundation was the Dorian scale, and to this were added two conjoined tetrachords, one at either end of the scale. This arrangement gave a compass of two octaves, lacking one note, and to complete the full octaves an extra note (called Proslam bano-menos, the acquired tone) was suffixed. Baker gives the following arrangement of the Perfect System: this system of transposed scales the Greeks ly acquired a complete series of sharps and flats.
The musical notation of the Greeks was very complicated. They used a double set of char acters, one for the singer and one for the player. At first there were fifteen characters (correspond ing to the notes of the diatonic scale), taken from the letters of the old Ionic alphabet. Other notes were made by changing slightly or invert ing these original characters. The musical in struments were few and simple. The lyre (q.v.), the cithara (q.v.), and the magadis, or harp, with from 20 to 40 strings, were the most impor tant stringed instruments; while the aulos, a flute, and the syrinx, a shepherd's pipe, were the sole wind instruments. Our examples of ancient Greek music are few. The oldest is a papyrus fragment of six lines of a chorus in the Orestes of Euripides. The fragment was written in the time of Augustus, but the music is much earlier.
Two hymns to Apollo, composed in the second century B.C., were found at Delphi in 1893. en graved on the marble walls of the Treasury of the Athenians. These have been specially studied by Reinach, Weil, and Crush's. Another inscrip tion from Asia Minor has preserved a short song with the musical notation. The other remnants are three hymns, two of which were composed in the time of Hadrian, and a few specimens of in It will be seen that, as in the original Dorian scale, the two middle tetrachords were disjoined. For modulations to the key of the lower quint, strumental music. It is of passing interest to note that in 1899 a concert of ancient Greek music was given in Bremen. Consult: Gevaert, La musique de l'antiguite (Ghent, 1875), the standard work on ancient music; La Melop& (Ghent, 1895-96) ; Monro, The Modes of An cient Greek Music (Oxford, 1894) ; and for tech nical treatises, Johnson, Musical Pitch and the Measurement of Intervals Among the Ancient Greeks(Baltimore,1896), and Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, vol. i. (Leipzig, 1888). For the re mains of Greek music and the theoretical trea tises, see K. von Jan, Musici Scriptores (Leipzig, 1895-99) ; Reinach and Weil in the Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenigue, xvii., xviii. (Paris, 1894-95) ; O. Crusius, Die Delphischen, Hym nen (Gottingen, 1894). See also Gleditsch in Miller's Handbuch der class. Altertum,swis senschaft, ii. 3 (3d ed., Munich, 1901).