Books › The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892 › scan 15
Scan 15
The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892
4 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1one. Writers of eminence, who, at that time, might be said to represent the literary view of the subject, had stated that it was then proved that the Greeks and the Romans were not acquainted with the use of bowed instruments. I suggested that the investigations which led to that conclusion had not been so thorough as to justify its expression in these absolute terms, and I offered some evidence in support of my conception that more proof of the bow's antiquity might be available if due care were observed in seeking it. Since then the question has been in some measure revived, and it is now admitted that the Greeks and Romans probably did know something about the archaic representative of the fiddle bow, and were very likely practically acquainted with its uses. From subsequent investigations, I confess it is to me almost impossible to believe that they could have been ignorant of it, when we take into consideration the antique monuments in existence which display figures of musicians with stringed instruments and rods in their hands, the latter of which could be of little or no use to them in any capacity other than that which the violin bow has to us.
3The evidence which I offered on the above point was a drawing from an Etruscan vase, in which an implement like an early bow was placed across the strings of a musical instrument, and in calling attention to this drawing, I said that the bow was placed so close to the strings as to appear as if it had no hair, and that it might on that account be claimed as a kind of plectrum, with which the ancients were
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