Barbiton

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, poems were written in order to be performed to a broader public; they were typically sung and accompanied by string instruments (a lyre, cithara, or barbitos).

These instruments will include, of course, the lyre (chelys and barbitos types), the phorminx, the cithara, the sambuca and the bendir.

Greek stringed instruments included the Chelys Lyre, Kithara, Barbitos, Phorminx, Thracian Kithara, and Harp.

flendus amor meus est; elegia flebile carmen; non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas.

Whereas his previous poems may have provided recreation, use of the Latinized Greek word "barbitos" (4), which is juxtaposed with the complement "Latinum ...

Another fragment (176), consisting entirely of three words, barbitos, baromos, barmos, offers a brief glimpse into what seems to be a poetic meditation on the low-pitched, long-armed lyre native to Lesbos.

After reading chapters of Ulysses (Joyce was a dangerous stimulus to Pound), the poet conflates, in poem I, Mauberley with the Greek wanderer: "His true Penelope was Flaubert/ He fished by obstinate isles." In poem III, modern vulgarity is simplistically set off against ancient beauty--the sort of thing Eliot is wrongly accused of doing in The Waste Land and elsewhere: "The piano `replaces'/Sappho's barbitos."