dingly weak. In the first place, the date of the book of Daniel is
matter of controversy, hingeing partly on precisely such questions as the
true significance and derivation of _sump[=o]ny[=a]_. Second, it is
possible that the word _sump[=o]ny[=a]_ is a late interpolation. Third, its
exact form is uncertain; in verse 10, _sipp[=o]ny[=a]_ is used of the same
instrument, suggesting a derivation from the Gr. [Greek: siphon] (tube or
pipe). Fourth, even if [Greek: sumphonia] is the source of the word, there
is very little evidence that it was used for any particular instrument. The
original natural sense of [Greek: sumphonia] is "concord of sound," "a
concordant interval," and the evidence of its use for a particular
instrument is of the 2nd century B.C., and, even so, very slight. Only one
passage (Polyb. xxvi. 10. 5) really bears on the question, and there the
translation of the word depends on a context the reading of which is
uncertain (see SYMPHONIA). It is, however, curious that the bag-pipe was
known in Italy and Spain during the middle ages, the two countries through
which Eastern culture was introduced into Europe, by the name of _zampogna_
or _sampogna_, which strongly recall the Chaldaean _sump[=o]ny[=a]_; and
further that in the same countries the word _sinfonia_ should be coexistent
with _zampogna_ and have the original meaning attached to the classical
[Greek: sumphonia], "a concord of sound." A single passage only in Dion
Chrysostom (see ASKAULES) is enough to prove that the instrument was known
in Greece in A.D. 100.[26] The Greeks had undoubtedly received some kind of
bag-pipe from Egypt (in the form of the _as-it_), or from Chaldaea, but it
remained a rustic instrument used only by shepherds and peasants. This
conclusion is supported by allusions in Aristophanes and in Plato's
_Crito_, which undoubtedly refer to the drone: "This, dear Crito, is the
voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears like the sound of the flute
(_aulos_) in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my
ears."[27] Aristophanes, in his play _The Acharnians_, indulges in a flight
of satire at the expense of the musical Boeotians, by making a band of
Theban pipers play a Boeotian merchant and his slave into town. The
musicians are dubbed "bumblebee pipers" ([Greek: bombaulioi], l. 866) by
the exasperated inhabitants. The verb used here for "blowing" is [Greek:
phusan], the very word applied to blowing or inflating the bel