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These Fragments preserve what remains of Phillis of Delos, a writer on music and chronology of whom little is known. His works are lost and survive only in citations by Athenaeus, the Suda and a Byzantine grammatical collection. They come from at least three works, On Times, On Music, of which a second book is cited, and On Aulos-Players, and cover the introduction of the alphabet to Greece, the names of stringed instruments, early citharodes and the drinking songs called skolia.
Though scanty, the fragments are useful evidence for ancient Greek musical instruments and performance practice, preserving technical names such as the pektis, magadis and klepsiambos. They also show how Greek scholars tried to date early cultural inventions such as writing.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FHG IV 476). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).