om a vase in the British
Museum.]

The Pythian Games survived the classic Greek period and were continued
under Roman sway until about A.D. 394. Not only were these games held at
Delphi, but smaller contests, called Pythia, modelled on the great
Pythian, were instituted in various provinces of the empire, and more
especially in Asia Minor. The games lasted for several days, the first
being devoted to music. To the games at Delphi came musicians from all
parts of the civilized world; and the Spaniards, at the beginning of our
era, had attained to such a marvellous proficiency in playing the
cithara, an instrument which they had learnt to know from the Phoenician
colonists before the conquest by the Romans, that some of their
citharoedi easily carried off the honours at the musical contests. The
consul Metellus was so charmed with the music of the Spanish competitors
that he sent some to Rome for the festivals, where the impression
created was so great that the Spanish citharoedi obtained a permanent
footing in Rome. Aulus Gellius (_Noct. Att._) describes an incident at a
banquet which corroborates this statement.

The degeneration of music as an art among the Romans, and its gradual
degradation by association with the sensual amusements of corrupt Rome,
nearly brought about its extinction at the end of the 4th century, when
the condemnation of the Church closed the theatres, and the great
national games came to an end. Instrumental music was banished from
civil life and from religious rites, and thenceforth the slender threads
which connect the musical instruments of Greeks and Romans with those of
the middle ages must be sought among the unconverted barbarians of
northern and western Europe, who kept alive the traditions taught them
by conquerors and colonists; but as civilization was in its infancy with
them the instruments sent out from their workshops must have been crude
and primitive. Asia, the cradle of the cithara, also became its
foster-mother; it was among the Greeks of Asia Minor that the several
steps in the transition from cithara into guitar[13] (q.v.) took place.

[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Asiatic Cithara in transition (or rotta). From a
fresco at Beni-Hasan (c. 1700 B.C.).]

[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Roman Cithara in transition, of the Lycian
Apollo (Rome Mus. Capit.).]

The first of these steps produced the rotta (q.v.), by the construction
of body, arms and transverse bar in one piece. The Semitic race