A fundamental obstacle to connecting Kinyras with Kinnaru of Ugarit, and Syro-Levantine lyre-culture generally, is the relative scarcity and lateness of sources linking him to music. It is therefore best to begin by securing this elusive dimension, which should be the heart of Kinyras. Once that is established, his extra-musical associations can then be explored as special developments.

Homer’s mention of Kinyras in Iliad 11 [1] prompted an impressively learned disquisition by Eustathios in his twelfth-century commentary—our single richest source for the mythical Cypriot king, followed by choppy notices in the Pindaric scholia. One passage especially opens many windows on Kinyras’ complex mythology: Eustathios has taken the bulk of this passage, somewhat denser than his usual rolling prose, from the corresponding Homeric scholia—one of his principal sources—with mainly cosmetic variations. [4] As often, however, he includes further details, highlighted in my translation. These are crucial: Kinyras was a musician, and took his name from the kinýra. [5]

The etymology is not Eustathios’ own idea, for we will see it in a second Byzantine source, where the context is proverbial. And elsewhere he offers a parallel derivation of kinȳ´resthai (‘threnodize’ [6] ) from kinýra. He supports this assertion, raised in a discussion of the Homeric adjective kinyrḗ (‘mournful’), with a remarkable allusion to professional threnodes: This derivation is too tangential to the Homeric passage, with too many idiosyncratic details, to be ad hoc invention; evidently Eustathios had access to a source well-informed about lamentation-singing in some parts and periods of the kinýra’s native range. That he is reproducing ancient etymologies is corroborated by the trope of Kinyras the Lamenter, present already in one of Ovid’s Greek models. [8] Since the derivation of kinȳ´resthai from kinýra is obviously of a piece with this, the whole complex can be traced back at least to the Hellenistic period. [9]

Of course this in itself does not guarantee that the etymologies were correct, as Hellenistic scholars delighted in fanciful lexical associations. But we saw that in the BA Near East the kinnāru was sometimes linked to mortuary cult and lamentation; I shall present further such material in Chapter 12, some bearing on kinýra itself in Greek sources. It may be objected that a direct connection between kinýra from kinȳ´resthai is ruled out by the differing quantities of upsilon (y/ȳ). [10] But we shall see below that ‘Greek’ kinýra often represents a variety of linguistic cognates from the East, most of which did indeed contain the long second vowel. [11] We may conclude that the ancient impulse to associate all these words was generally justified.

I have already noted the faulty cultural assumptions beneath the view of J. P. Brown—writing without knowledge of Kinnaru—that Eustathios’ etymology of Kinyras < kinýra was a false, Christianizing interpretation. [12] The deficiency of this is still more evident from the larger context of the passage, since it cannot account for the further musical material which Brown did not address—the contest of Kinyras and Apollo.

Eustathios’ summary exhibits many details that would appeal to a Hellenistic poet or early imperial mythographer: ethnographic trivia from a marginal locale, aetiological metamorphosis, and etymological wordplay. Besides the derivation of Kinyras from kinýra itself, the halcyons are born from a “leap” (halésthai) into the “sea,” where thálassan may conceal a further play on hála (‘brine’) in an anterior source. [13] There was perhaps another pun on Apollo as ‘the destroyer’ (hence apolōlénai).

Yet the contest per se conforms to a well-known and generally older pattern, already found in Homer, relating to Apollo’s Panhellenic displacement of or syncretism with epichoric ‘rivals’. [14] Especially numerous are the Olympian’s musical competitions: the flaying of Marsyas; the thieving young Hermes’ threatening new lyre; [15] the killing of Linos for using linen lyre strings, or for putting his own musical ability on a level with the god’s. [16] There is also Apollo’s takeover of the Cretan deity Paiawon, echoed in his kidnapping of paian-singing priests in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. [17]

So Apollo’s contest with Kinyras is readily viewed as a cultural ‘confrontation’, whether through ongoing commerce between Greece and Cyprus, the transplantation and growth of Apollo-cult on the island itself, or both. And there are other mythological expressions of this encounter, which is hostile only in the present case. [18] All such constructions must echo the long-term historical adjacency of Aegean and Cypriot musical traditions, and more specifically their lyric strains. [19] We shall see much further evidence for this in what follows.

Now Kinyras’ deception of Agamemnon is elsewhere attested and must derive from the lost epic Kypria. [20] But this episode was probably never linked to the contest with Apollo outside of a mythological handbook. In the imaginative reconstruction of C. Vellay, Agamemnon’s curse called down madness on Kinyras, who thus challenged Apollo and was killed by the god’s arrows, with his desperate daughters then throwing themselves into the sea. [21] But the italicized material has no basis in the text, and the Greek of the scholion and Eustathios can be punctuated to make a division into two separate myths a natural reading. [22] Madness and arrows aside, a king’s curse provoking a musical contest seems a very tenuous link. Agamemnon’s anger finds a more natural sequel in a Cypriot tradition treated by Theopompos, whereby the Mycenaean king and his men drove Kinyras from power. [23] Conversely, the many fatal confrontations between Apollo and upstart musicians strongly suggest that Eustathios’ contest was originally a self-standing myth.

Kinyras’ musical death and the metamorphosis of his daughters, however, are an organic unit. [24] The halcyon’s lament was proverbial already for Homer, [25] suggesting a connection between Kinyras’ ill-fated daughters and the topos of Kinyras ‘The Lamenter’ (see Chapter 12). [26] Note that kinȳ´resthai became a Hellenistic mannerism to evoke the plaintive songs of halcyons, swallows, and other sorrowing birds. [27] This provides an attractive context for the curious kinnyrídes, which Hesykhiοs glosses as ‘tiny little birds’. [28] The word is probably a poetic coinage, these creatures being otherwise unknown. [29] The feminine plural form, with what may be taken as a patronymic suffix, suggests something very close to ‘daughters of Kinyras’. [30] In any case, Kinyras’ halycon-daughters probably aetiologized female choruses like those shown on the Cypro-Phoenician bowls, which feature lyres, pipes, frame-drums, and dancers (see Chapter 11). One may compare the metamorphosis of the Pierides, rivals of the Heliconian Muses, into magpies; or the Meleagrides, sisters of Meleager, who, as they lamented their brother’s death, were transformed by Diana into guinea hens. [31] Equally apposite is a fragment of Alkman (ca. 625), seemingly from a prelude to a Spartan maiden-dance, in which the kitharōidós imagines himself an aged male halcyon, born along by a young female chorus: The image of a lyrist surrounded by birds is very ancient; the two elements are conjoined in iconography of the second and even third millennium, in both the Aegean and ANE. [33] These scenes are generally held to represent divine epiphany, whether effected by a musician alone or as part of a larger performance. [34]

I conclude therefore that Eustathios and the scholion present a fusion of two originally independent Kinyras myths, both rooted in archaic mythmaking. But the contest in its present form has passed through Hellenistic or later hands. The halcyon daughters could have appeared in one of the fashionable Hellenistic compendia of metamorphoses—perhaps Boios’ Creation of Birds. [35] Another more tangible candidate is the Novel History of the early imperial wonder-monger Ptolemy Khennos (‘The Quail’); I defend this suggestion in Appendix B. The episodes were eventually conjoined by someone wishing to develop a coherent biography of the Cypriot king, though whether they were ever causally linked is very doubtful.

A second Byzantine source that makes Kinyras a musician is an anonymous epistolary poem, from a thirteenth-century codex but itself somewhat older. The poet flatters a musician-friend, likening him to: These verses, though bland, preciously establish Kinyras as a proverbial musician. Indeed, the rhetorical structure, slight as it is, shows that he was considered the best of the lot. And the company he keeps verifies that Kinyras was a lyre-player. The poet was obviously familiar with the etymology known to Eustathios, which was therefore popular. Dismissing Kinyras’ inclusion here as a late, Christianizing artifact would strain incredibly against the cumulative evidence. It may be, however, that his association with kinýra—the instrument of David, and a potent Christian symbol—did give him a renewed edge against the lyrists of Greek pagan mythology. Still, any such favor that Kinyras enjoyed must have been equally rooted in living musical traditions going back to pre-Christian antiquity. In the home range of the knr, ‘Kinyras’—in whatever linguistic guise—will always have stood out from imported Aegean figures, no matter how firmly Hellenistic settlement in the East lodged them in local artistic and literary convention.

At first glance, admittedly, the musical deeds attributed to Kinyras are suspicious. In classical sources, the lyric control of animals and trees is credited not to Thamyris or Kinyras, but to Orpheus—who appears first in the poet’s list. Moving rocks is typically associated with Amphion and building seven-gated Thebes, but Orpheus too can move them in Euripides. [37] Later authors sometimes lump Orpheus and Amphion together for their magical music. [38] Our verses are thus something of a pastiche, and one may suspect that the powers of Orpheus and Amphion have been extended to Thamyris and Kinyras by artistic license.

Yet why should we suppose that this lyric pastiche did not equally entail an eastern contribution? David we saw charms beast, bird, and nature, and Solomon had power over animal and mineral. [39] When Constantine Manasses, a twelfth-century chronicler, attributes to David’s kinýra the power of charming “even stones,” it is surely more than conflation with Amphion. [40] One should equally resist bland Orphic interpretations of such images as a sixth-century floor-mosaic from a synagogue in Gaza, where David (tastefully restored) charms snake, lion, and giraffe with his lyre (Figure 15). [41] True, David is attired as a Byzantine emperor, and his instrument betrays centuries of Greco-Roman influence. [42] Yet this was still a synagogue; the mosaic’s dedicatory inscription is in Greek, but its donors have Jewish names. Hybrid iconography presupposes a receptive partner, and we have seen that the Syro-Levantine ‘lyrist with animals’ motif goes back to the EBA (Figure 6). [43] The mysterious, animal-charming ‘kinyrist’ of the eleventh-century ‘Orpheus jug’ holds more than enough eastern promise to account for the thaumaturgical Kinyras of our verses (Figure 13). [44] Jug and poem are separated by two millennia; but the gulf is largely spanned by the knr tradition itself. To ‘outplay’ Orpheus and Thamyris, Kinyras’ musical roots must have been as deep and wide as theirs—and more so in the Byzantine East.

And so we come to the basic conundrum that has caused scholars to reject, as late artifice, Eustathios’ derivation of Kinyras < kinýra. [45] This is the apparent disparity between Kinyras’ nonmusical qualities in early Greek poetry, and the comparatively late first attestation of kinýra, in the LXX translations of the third century. It is often stated or assumed that this word was borrowed directly from Hebrew; many have held that it was coined to translate kinnōr. [46] Admittedly, the most visible subsequent examples are either in overtly Judaic contexts like Josephus, or in Christian writers who might seem to elaborate that tradition. [47] But this cannot be right.

One immediate challenge is posed by generic-sounding definitions in ancient lexica—for example, “kinýra: a musical instrument; kithára”—where there is no obvious reason to exclude extra-Biblical contexts. [48]

Besides, Heb. kinnōr could have been rendered much more accurately than ‘kinýra’. The form itself, indeed, decisively places the adaptation well before the LXX. The Semitic originals from which a ‘Greek’ adaptation could derive would either have preserved the ancient vocalization kinnār- which persisted in North Syria, or come from the Canaanite/Phoenician sphere, where ā had shifted to ō by ca. 1800–1400. [49] While the original, unshifted vocalization has indeed left a few traces in our sources (see below), the upsilon of kinýra cannot have represented ā at any point in Greek history. By the same token, the Greek letter can only have corresponded to Semitic ō or ū prior to the fourth or even fifth century BCE, by which time its original sound—a back closed, rounded vowel of variable length (ŭ/ū)—was already assuming a pronounced fronted quality (like German ü) in the Ionic dialect (whose sound values became a point-of-reference when the Ionic alphabet was adapted, via Athens, for use in regional inscriptions beginning in the fourth century). [50]

A third-century Greek adaptation would thus have rendered Phoenician *kinnūr as *kin(n)our or even *kyn(n)our. In fact, the latter form is found in a typically calculated passage of Lykophron, whose Alexandra is a Trojan Cycle in miniature—a monstrous display of Hellenistic learning masquerading as the ominous ravings of Kassandra. [51] E. L. Brown argued convincingly that Paris is portrayed as a lyre-playing gadabout en route to Sparta, “passing the night by causing the nine-sail expeditionary band to leap-and-prance … to the accompaniment of the ‘eastern lyre’ (pròs kynoûra).” [52] This reinterpretation, which after all accords with Homer’s own depiction of Paris as a lyrist, [53] brings sudden sense to a passage that was already obscure to ancient critics. [54] But why did Lykophron adopt what from a contemporary Greek perspective was not only an archaizing phonetic spelling, but at odds with the short upsilon of kinýra, which on any account will have been current in the poet’s time? As it happens, etymological speculation about kinýra and its seeming relations provided considerable entertainment for Alexandrian and other Hellenistic savants. [55] These parallels assure us that Lykophron’s pròs kynoûra was a willful contrivance; conversely, kinýra must have had connotations he wished to avoid. Apart from any possible metrical convenience, the poet may have wanted to defamiliarize the word for poetic effect, enhancing his oriental characterization of Paris. Possibly he intended to present kinýra as pronounced in legendary times. On the other hand, long pronunciations of the second syllable would still have been heard in the Semitic dialects of Alexandria and the Levant. That Lykophron cast his coinage into the third declension, rather than the first of kinýra, equally accords with *Phoenician and Hebrew forms, which had lost their ancestral final vowels centuries earlier. [56] Remarkably, however, the poet gives his first upsilon its contemporary Greek value, as though tipping us off to his anachronistic novelty. [57] But then Lykophron is filled with riddles from start to finish.

In any case, it is certain that when the LXX represented kinnōr as kinýra, this was a true translation, using a ‘Greek’ word that long predated the new Hellenistic settlements that followed Alexander’s conquests. [58] It must have been obvious, of course, to all educated Jews, that kinýra and Hebrew kinnōr were essentially the same word. [59] Yet Hebrew will hardly have been the direct source of kinýra. We must look to the Greco-Levantine interface more broadly.

O. Szemerényi repeatedly traced Semitic loanwords in Greek to specific periods and source dialects, using vocalization as a key diagnostic. [60] The phonetic and phonemic inventory of an adapting language naturally reshapes the original, and the outcomes are often more than random distortions. [61] But the situation is seriously complicated by unknown and undeciphered intermediaries; crucial missing pieces are Minoan and other pre-Greek languages of the Aegean and Cyprus. The impact of these lost tongues on early loanwords must not be underestimated.

There is sufficient evidence to show that kinýra was once but one of several adaptations of knr in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Greek lexicographic tradition has preserved a few sparse traces of Syrian (i.e. non-Canaanite/Phoenician) originals. Thus, alongside Homeric kítharis (‘lyre-playing’ and later ‘lyre’), one finds the parallel kínaris. [62] It is impossible to say which form was modeled on the other; perhaps they developed side-by-side. Still more striking, Hesykhiοs has an entry for a verb kinarýzesthai, which he defines as “to lament with groaning.” [63] The derivation of this remarkable word from knr is again justified by the evidence, ANE and Greek alike, for the lyre’s association with lamentation (Chapter 12). And the upsilon of kinarýzesthai surely echoes the ancient Semitic form kinnāru(m), found at Ebla, Mari, and Ugarit. [64] It is thus potentially quite old in Greek, given the EIA evanescence of inherited final vowels in Aramaic, Phoenician, and Hebrew. [65]

These rare ‘unshifted’ forms are hard to pinpoint historically. One may think, for instance, of an adaptation from Aramaic during ‘Philistine’ settlement of the Amuq in the EIA, or a later trade colony like Al-Mina (ca. 800). [66] An equally attractive candidate is Cilicia, once part of the Hurro-Luwian state of Kizzuwatna in the LBA. [67] One should note here that Kinyras himself has a Cilician pedigree in several traditions, including one that makes his father Syrian. [68] Another was adopted—or contrived—by the mysterious Theodontius, a lost source for Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (ca. 1350–1375). But it is probably just a striking coincidence that these authors, followed by Étienne de Lusignan, give the spelling Cinaras rather than Cinyras. [69]

A Syrian musical milieu must also underlie the Cinara whom Horace loved in his youth—an allusion to the Syrian musiciennes who became a fixture of Roman streetlife after Pompey annexed the region in 64 BCE (see further Appendix C).

Another notable phonetic variant is the long upsilon of kinȳ´resthai versus the short vowel of kinýra, kinyrízein, and Kinýras. [70] There are other cases of Semitic loanwords preserving their vowel-length in Greek; there are also exceptions. [71] While kinȳ´resthai normally relates to threnody in Greek sources, [72] this need not require complete dissociation from knr, since the instrument’s use in and/or association with ANE lamentative contexts provides the necessary semantic link (Chapter 12). Moreover, while the derivation of kinýra from a long-vowel original like *kinnūr is beyond doubt, it is the long upsilon of kinȳ´resthai that corresponds more closely to the original Canaanite/Phoenician forms.

Thus, we should trust the instincts of sources that connect kinýra and kinȳ´resthai without batting an eye. Besides Eustathios, note several lexicon entries that are tied to a passage of Apollonios of Rhodes: For this etymology to work, the short-upsilon kinýra must stand generically for one or more ANE cognates that maintained the original long vowel; but such a universalizing usage is well paralleled (see below).

The relevant passage of Apollonios completes a simile that began with a sunny scene of happy, busy bees. These he compares, in a much discussed mood reversal, [74] with the Lemnian women ‘whining about’ the Argonauts, beseeching them not to leave: The contrast between tenor and vehicle is jarring, discordant; many scholars agree with the scholiast that “the comparison is not sound nor harmonious in all respects … the meadow rejoices and exults, and yet the city is in pain, which is why he says ‘kinȳrómenai’.” [76] This straightforward reading is certainly natural, and accords with the earlier scene of Jason’s mother lamenting his departure (using the same verb). [77] Yet this makes all the more striking the lexicographers’ definition of the word as “singing” and “playing music.” The viability of a non-lamentative sense is seconded by another lexical entry—this time with no clear link to Apollonios—which connects kinýra itself with a verb kin ýrō, defined as both “threnodize” and “sing.” [78] These ‘positive’ musical definitions are a kind of lectio difficilior that must be explained.

R. J. Clare has explicated, in the larger Lemnian episode, Apollonios’ careful manipulation of emotional expectations, climaxing in the present scene with kinȳrómenai being “the crux of the entire comparison”; it is “a jolt in itself to realise that lamenting is being compared to rejoicing … a reflection of the sudden comprehension of the women as their idyllic interlude disintegrates and optimism turns to pessimism.” [79] Given Hellenistic interest in kinȳ´resthai and its apparent cognates, [80] it would seem that Apollonios has exploited, in support of his purposefully dissonant simile, a semantic bifurcation between the celebratory and plaintive that was inherent in the word. [81] This reading is supported by several performative nuances that result. Lamentation could be addressed to the gods apotropaically against future misfortune. [82] That is clearly operative here, and later we shall see a kinýra used in just this way. [83] But the image of women streaming out of a city equally evokes the ANE custom, attested in the Bible, of greeting victorious, homecoming warriors with celebratory music—just the outcome for which the Lemnian women beseech the gods. [84] This perverted ‘coming out’ scene neatly reprises the further careful permutation with which the Lemnian sojourn began—when the women, fearing that the arriving Argonauts were enemies, poured forth under arms. [85]

I conclude that Apollonios, like Lykophron, has carefully crafted his passage around an ongoing poetic and scholarly dialogue about kinȳ´resthai and its presumed cognates.

The phonetic discrepancy between forms in y and ȳ is explicable in regional terms, resulting from parallel adaptations in separate linguistic spheres. Leaving aside many self-conscious literary examples of kinȳ´resthai in Hellenistic and later poetry, [86] the harder demographic evidence of epigraphy indicates the word’s popular currency in Anatolian funerary inscriptions of the Roman era. [87] Here kinȳ´resthai describes lamentation—or better threnody (see Chapter 12)—by the bereaved when dedicating the stone; by committing this act to an ostensibly permanent medium, a one-time funerary rite was effectively converted into a perpetual mortuary cult. [88] That kinȳ´resthai was particularly at home in Anatolia would also help explain a passage in Aristophanes’ Knights (424 BCE), where the verb describes “lamenting a lyre-pipe concert (synaulían), the mode of Olympos” (the legendary Phrygian aulete). [89]

If kinȳ´resthai is indeed to be connected with knr, as seems inevitable—and note that an Anatolian context could be equally indicated by Lykophron’s Paris and even Apollonios’ Lemnian women—one might look to the westerly Phoenician expansion along the Anatolian coast in the eighth and seventh centuries, attested by inscriptions in Cilicia and Pamphylia, and other sporadic traces from Lycia and Caria in southwestern Anatolia. [90] Compare the threnodic Phoenician pipes known as gíngras, which our sources indicate took special hold among the Carians. [91] The word is also said to be an alternative name for Adonis: It has long been proposed to derive gíngras and several related words from knr, and to see Adonis-Gingras as a doublet of Kinyras. [93] If this derivation is right, gíngras would constitute yet another epichoric adaptation, presumably localized in Caria if one may trust the sources. [94] Although it would result in a remarkable semantic shift from lyre to pipes, [95] this might be explicable via the poetics of ritual performance. [96]

The Anatolian associations of kinȳ´resthai encourage us to seek the origin of kinýra and other short-upsilon forms elsewhere. Admittedly parts of Anatolia remain poorly documented. Yet one cannot ignore Cyprus as a probable locus for parallel adaptations, since the island was the epicenter of Greek cultural and linguistic interface with Syria and the Levant from at least the twelfth century BCE. [97] This privileged position is reflected in a Cyprocentric conception of the eastern Mediterranean that must equally go back to the EIA migrations. Already for Homer, Menelaos’ homecoming route from Troy took him “wandering through Cyprus and Phoenicia and the Egyptian people”—that is, clockwise around what the geographer Strabo, commenting on the passage, called “the lands around Cyprus.” [98] The same idea helps account for the description of Paphos as ‘the center of the world’ (gês omphalós), alluding to its far-famed sanctuary, which rivaled Delphi itself. [99] Even after Greek horizons were expanded in the Hellenistic age, the island’s cultural prominence was out of proportion to its size; this is well illustrated by the Tabula Peutingeriana, a thirteenth-­century map going back to a Roman original of later antiquity, with still older antecedents. [100] Here Cyprus, greatly magnified, is the focus of the eastern Mediterranean (Figure 16). [101]

The island’s central location and large concentration of Greek-speakers provide a compelling explanation for how a specifically Greco-Cypriot form—I mean kinýra—could eventually prevail in the Hellenistic koine. Until recently this would have been but an educated guess. It can now be corroborated by evidence from Cyprus itself.

In 1959, a marble slab was discovered in secondary use at a church in the village of Nikokleia, near Palaipaphos. It contains an oath of allegiance to Tiberius, taken by the Community of Cyprus on the Roman emperor’s accession in 14 CE. [102] Several gods are invoked as witnesses: When T. B. Mitford first published the stone in 1960, he read Apollo’s second cult-title as Ke[r]yṇẹ̄́tēn, connecting it with Keryneia on the north coast. This was not entirely satisfactory: the site is rarely mentioned in ancient sources, and none attests a connection with Apollo. [104] J.-B. Cayla has recently made a vital contribution, perceiving that the correct reading is in fact Ke[n]yṛ[i]ṣtḗn. This I can corroborate from my own examination of the stone. [105]

On Cyprus, and especially at Paphos, kenyristḗs inevitably evokes Kinyras. It clearly interprets the legendary Cypriot king as a form of Apollo. [106] But what exactly is implied?

As Mitford saw, the qualification of the oath-gods as ‘ours’ indicates their distinctively Cypriot status. The particular combination of divinities, however, remains obscure, with several being otherwise poorly attested. Mitford speculated that they were intended to represent the island regionally, and although the geographical associations of Kore and the Dioskouroi are too poorly known to permit conclusive demonstration, the hypothesis would accord well enough with the totalizing reference to “the common ancestral gods and goddesses of the island.” [107] Cayla uses this pan-Cypriot perspective to explain the surprising absence of such famous Cypriot powers as Paphian Aphrodite and Salaminian Zeus, strongly associated with particular cities. [108] But it is possible that these and other gods were indeed invoked in a lost stone containing the oath’s preamble. [109] In any case, while the precise rationale behind the surviving theoì hórkioi is still unclear, “Our Kenyristḗs Apollo” is a uniquely Cypriot figure.

Any deeper appreciation depends upon determining the meaning(s) of kenyristḗs. The word is clearly related to the verb kinyrízein, which, though only thrice attested, must once have been more widely current than this would suggest. [110] These two words are most naturally interpreted in light of three exact parallels from the world of lyre-playing, the agent-verb pairs kitharistḗs-kitharízein, phormiktḗs-phormízein, and lyristḗs-lyrízein. [111] Kenyristḗs should therefore simply mean ‘the kinýra-player’, and kinyrízein ‘to play the kinýra’.

And yet kinyrízein has been almost universally interpreted along different lines. This misunderstanding derives from the earliest attestation, a rhapsodic variant in the Iliad championed by Zenodotos (fl. ca. 285), Homeric critic and first librarian of Alexandria; it was later disputed by Aristarkhos of Samothrace (ca. 216–144), who advanced his own preference, which is itself distinct from what has come down in the manuscript tradition. We know of this scholarly issue from Aristonikos, a critic of the Augustan age who mentioned it in his Homeric commentary, along with many of Aristarkhos’ other readings, which he often contrasts with those of Zenodotos. The verse in question forms part of Achilles’ rebuttal of Phoinix who, as a member of the embassy sent by Agamemnon to soothe the sulking warrior, has just finished his cautionary exemplum about the destructive pride of Meleagros. The three versions are as follows:

We are told that Zenodotos treated odyrómenos kinyrízōn “as if it meant thrēnôn”—that is, ‘singing a funeral dirge’. One can hardly suppose that Zenodotos did not know what the phrase meant: odyrómenos, and the correspondence of kinyrízōn with akheúōn, guarantee that kinyrízein could be at least connected with lamentation. And yet this would be readily explained by the kinýra’s use in threnody. [115] According to Aristonikos (evidently reproducing the opinion of Aristarkhos) Zenodotos’ variant was “un-Homeric and out-of-character” (parà tò prósōpon). [116] Not all modern scholars have been persuaded by this condemnation, [117] but editors have generally preferred the traditional version for its “parallelismus membrorum and the accumulation of synonyms,” while the variants of Zenodotos and Aristarkhos have been attributed to the Alexandrian desire to avoid such constructions, diversify at the expense of formulaic diction, and increase sentimentality. [118] Still, the variant enjoys solid precedents in the formulaic system. Odyrómenos stenakhízō, attested four times in the same position, would readily support a substitution of kinyrízōn in a lamentative sense without requiring that the two be strictly synonymous. [119] Crucial here is the frequent occurrence of kitharízōn (‘playing the kithára’) and collateral forms in the same verse-final position, typically preceded by an adverbial expression. [120]

When we come to consider kinýra-lamentation in more detail, I shall argue that Zenodotos’ variant introduces interesting nuances to the scene. [121] But first we must corroborate this ‘lyric’ interpretation of kinyrízein. Of the word’s two other attestations, which Classicists have hitherto overlooked, [122] it will suffice to present only the earlier here. The second, being quite late (ninth century), raises further historical issues and needs more convoluted argument; it is analyzed in Appendix D.

The Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena are a pair of hagiographical romances variously dated between the third and fifth centuries CE, recounting the Christian conversions of the title figures—the wife and sister-in-law of Roman Spain’s governor in the time of Claudius. [123] At the relevant juncture, Xanthippe had sneaked out of the house, as her Christ-resisting husband slept, to seek the apostle Paul. Assaulted en route by a troop of demons, Paul materialized like a superhero to the rescue, after which he promptly baptized her as a precaution against further mishap. Safely home, Xanthippe pours out praise of Jesus and Paul: Xanthippe’s irrepressible inner joy clearly does not support a threnodic sense for kinnyrízōn. Some scholars, seeking a parallel with the verb minyrízein, suggest a translation like “someone murmurs inside of me.” [125] Yet minyrízein typically connotes despondency; even its most positive possible sense, ‘sing in a low tune, warble, hum’, will hardly suit Xanthippe’s ebullience. [126] The metaphor must convey the ineffable and intimate—even erotic [127] —exultation with which Jesus fills Xanthippe. For this, thrilling lyre-music would be highly apt. Divine praise-hymns and other celebratory and amatory occasions are well known for the kinnōr in the Bible and the kinnāru elsewhere in the Syro-Levantine world, and are equally attested in Gk. for kinýra—Photios defining “musics” as “glad delights as from pipes and kinýra, and similar things.” [128] This lyric interpretation is corroborated by the -nn- of kinnyrízōn, which betrays an association with ANE forms like kinnōr (see below). In the Acts of Xanthippe, therefore, we have one of many illustrations of the Christian ‘conversion’ of earlier Pythagorean and Platonic ideas of cosmic harmony and the soul as an attunement (harmonía). [129] A particularly illuminating parallel comes from Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215 CE), who presents Jesus as a new Apollo, Orpheus, Amphion, or Arion—an enchanting “new song” (kainòn aîsma) or incantation (epōidḗ) to replace the seductive deceptions of pagan liturgical music: [130] Similar ideas relating to the knr specifically are found in St. Ephraim’s elaboration of the ‘Lyre of the Spirit’ and the ‘Lyres of God’. [132] Jesus is thus playing sweet, passionate music on Xanthippe’s ‘inner kin(n)ýra’. [133]

We must conclude that, while Apollo is not unknown as a lamenting god, [134] his Cypriot epithet kenyristḗs meant, first and foremost, the ‘kinýra-player’. This effectively glosses Kinyras himself, showing that this name/word too could entail a sense of agency: ‘Kinyras’ is ‘the kinýra-player’ (see Chapter 17). Kenyristḗs also presents an obvious parallel with kitharōidós (‘kithára-singer’), one of Apollo’s most familiar guises—reflecting his patronage of professional lyrists, in whose image he was typically represented. [135] But the insistence on “Our Kinyrist” shows that this Apollo, whatever the immediate reasons for his inclusion in the theoì hórkioi, [136] stands for the full musical range of the island’s own lyrical traditions. These used not the kithára, not the phórminx, not the lýra—but the kinýra. [137]

The deliberate and traditional character of the epithet, in an official document of Tiberian date, becomes all the more palpable when one considers the long musical engagement of Cyprus with the outside world, and especially the Aegean. The island and its singers helped formulate several Cyprocentric themes that found their way into mainstream Greek epic. [138] The lost Kypria—attributed in ancient sources to either Stasinos or Hegesias/Hegesinos of Salamis—must have contained the ‘Cypriot Hosting of the Achaeans’, with Kinyras’ terracotta fleet. [139] A lyre-singer Stesandros—or better Stasandros—of Salamis performed ‘battles à la Homer’ at Delphi, apparently in the sixth century; although Athenaios ranks him among historical kitharōidoí, he himself probably considered his instrument a kinýra. [140]

Mainstream Greek genres must also have been increasingly visible on the island with the emergence of international musical celebrities and professional concert circuits from the Classical period onwards. [141] Thus, the early fourth century saw Stratonikos—the Groucho Marx of the kithára—at Salamis and/or Paphos; while these anecdotes transpire in the royal courts, Stratonikos was equally famous for his public recitals. [142] Around the same time, Nikokles I of Salamis is said by Theopompos to have vied with Straton of Sidon in making his court luxurious, bringing citharodes and rhapsodes from Greece, as well as singing- and dancing-girls. [143] Cypriot patronage of dithyramb and tragedy is also attested: Alexander held musical contests in Phoenicia that were made splendid by the lavish expenditures of the island’s kings, who competed with each other as executive producers (khorēgoí). [144] It is in this same period that Cypriot statuary, as part of the medium’s more general assimilation to a Hellenistic koine, [145] shows several lyres which are influenced by the kithára in their upper structure, yet maintain the round base of their Cypriot ancestors (Figure 27e). [146] Yet even here such precedents as the Khrysokhou lyrist (Figure 17) and the instrument on the Louvre amphora (Figure 5.5q, tenth or ninth century) make unilateral ‘Greek influence’ a problematic assumption. [147]

Cypriot performers are well attested outside the island during the Hellenistic period, typically as victorious competitors at foreign festivals. [148] An inscription from Nemea, plausibly dated to 323/322, lists several Cypriot kings serving as theōrodókoi—that is, hosting the Nemean ambassadors who came to announce upcoming games. [149] Between the mid-second and early first century, a Cypriot branch of the Artists of Dionysos is attested, seemingly headquartered at Paphos; it was evidently promoted by the Ptolemies to support their dynastic cult during the troubled accessions of this period. [150] In the earliest inscription (ca. 144–131), the only one to give any information about the guild’s organization, a citharode Kriton is named president. [151] This is the first secure evidence that the word kithára was current on the island. Yet one can hardly assume that it had displaced kinýra. [152] The Artists of Dionysos were avowedly professional and international in outlook, and therefore cannot represent the totality of popular and cultic music-making on the island. [153]

Because Cyprus was the ancient epicenter of Greek in the region, it was the island’s kinýra, rather than a number of parallel forms having all but disappeared from the record, which prevailed in the Hellenistic koine. That it was then used to render Heb. kinnōr is but one conspicuous example of a quite universalizing usage whereby kinýra became a blanket term for referring to the lyric cultures of Syria and the Levant. It is still possible, however, to detect linguistic and cultural multiformity behind a number of scribal variants in the transmission of Greek manuscripts, as well as several translation phenomena.

It is not unusual to encounter textual oscillations between -n- and -nn- in the representation of kin(n)ýra, Kin(n)yras, kin(n)yrós (‘plaintive’), and kin(n)ȳ´resthai (‘threnodize’). A single -n- is metrically guaranteed for all by Greek poetic sources, variously from Homer onwards; they are equally found in prose. It is clear therefore that these forms reflect genuine Grecophone pronunciations. This divergence from -nn- in the Near East must be due, like the short upsilon of kinýra, to phonetic differences in one or more adapting languages. Nevertheless, spellings in kinnyr- were clearly seen as legitimate by many authors and anonymous scribes, for whom an origin or association with Syria or the Levant, when not directly attested, may be reasonably inferred. Especially revealing is the exchange of kinýra and kinnýra in manuscripts of the LXX, where the Hebraic context helps explain the ‘confusion’—or better reverse engineering (and note that such a kinnýra was probably regarded as having a long upsilon). [154] Elsewhere an eastern provenance may seem likely on biographical grounds, but cannot be certainly established. [155] In Greek metrical works, forms with n must generally be preferred. [156] But otherwise there is no reliable criterion for deciding whether an author originally intended -nn- rather than -n-, or if one or the other was introduced by a scribe. In every case, however, these variants betray alternative and vital regional pronunciations. In the Byzantine period, there were certainly many bilingual scribes in and from Syria and the Levant (a considerable number of monks left Muslim Palestine for Constantinople in the eighth and early ninth centuries [157] ).

The great value of these nn variants is that they attest a fairly general belief that the several Greek words were etymologically related to Phoen. *kinnūr, Heb. kinnōr, etc. In particular I would emphasize that the variant of Kinnyras for Kinyras [158] echoes the ancient form Kinnaru at Ugarit. Indeed the principle of the lectio difficilior would normally urge us to accept ‘Kinnyras’ as the ‘correct’ reading, were not ‘Kinyras’ itself otherwise sanctioned by Greek usage. [159] In fact, neither ‘reading’ is exclusively correct: ‘Kin(n)yras’ was at home in more than one linguistic-cultural sphere.

The foregoing scribal variants are symptomatic of the long-term overlap of Greek and Syro-Levantine cultures, which, though a central feature of Greek-Cypriot life from at least the twelfth century BCE, became a much more widespread phenomenon in the Hellenistic period. Given this situation, it is likely that some ‘bi-musicality’, rather than the mere influence of scripture, underlies Byzantine writers’ periodic use of ki(n)nýra in contexts where one expects the simple Greek kithára. [160] John Tzetzes, the encyclopedic pedant of twelfth-century Constantinople, who was Georgian on his mother’s side and at least superficially familiar with a number of other languages, calls Pindar ‘the Theban kinýra’ without missing a beat. [161] Elsewhere Tzetzes replaces kithára with kinýra in paraphrasing Prokopios. [162] Similarly, Theodoros II, emperor of Byzantine Nicaea (1254–1258), expressed inexpressible Christian joy by rhapsodizing: “Who will take up the kinýra of Orpheus? Who will tune it in the manner of Pindar?” [163] There are many other examples of this interchangeability. [164]

In other cases when kinýra has won through against kithára, further dialectal variety lurks. Forms in kinnyr- or kinnar- must often have been leveled to kinyr- under mainstream literary influence in the Greek East—whether by translators of Syriac writings, bilingual Syro-Levantine authors, and/or later copyists of either. [165] Thus, in the Greek works attributed to Saint Ephraim (ca. 306–373 CE), one finds kinýra rather than the kinnār(a) Ephraim himself would have used in his native Syriac. [166] Philip of Side, in his early fifth century CE Christian History, used kinyrístriai of the female lyrists, in the temple of the Babylonian Hera, who accompanied the Muses’ spontaneous song on the night of Christ’s birth (among other portents); here too the cultural setting should imply an underlying Aramaic form. [167] The opposite process would have occurred with Aramaic translations of Biblical books (the targums), where the triconsonantal root knr would easily pass out of Hebrew vocalization. There is even a Syriac commentary on 2 Kings, attributed to Ephraim, in which ‘cinnara’ is called a translation of the Hebrew word. [168] One should be similarly sensitive to the frequent use of Greek kithára or psaltḗrion in Christian contexts where it answers to the original kinnōr of the Bible. [169] When this is found in texts deriving from the greater Syrian sphere—for instance with Gregory of Nyssa, in Cappadocia (d. after 394)—it is quite possible that the author himself would have used kinnār(a) when speaking to his neighbors.

I have shown that kinýra and several cognates, along with the instruments so designated, enjoyed a life in the Byzantine world independent of Biblical exegesis. [170] This is the cultural framework within which Eustathios and the anonymous poet still knew Kinyras as a proverbial lyrist, and accepted without question an etymological link with kinýra and kinȳ´resthai. Because the knr’s traditional range, for many centuries, fell largely within Byzantine territory, the burden of proof must be on those who would insist that, when a Christian author writes kinýra, he has only the Jewish instrument in mind, or that any symbolism he attaches to it derives exclusively from the Bible. His independence will be especially clear when not simply commenting on scripture, but engaged in his own creative work.

It is certain that the etymology of Kinyras from kinýra was no anachronistic Christian construct, but went back into the pagan past, and was long recalled by some in Cyprus and the Syro-Levantine home range of the knr. “Our Kenyristḗs Apollo,” as a recasting of Kinyras, looks back from Roman Paphos upon a distinctively Cypriot lyric art form stretching into past centuries. We must now trace this tradition as far back as possible, and determine the depth and nature of Kinyras’ involvement with it. Our first step takes us to the fifth century and the poet Pindar.