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Ancient Greece       The ancient Greeks used a stringed instrument for much of their music. This common stringed instrument for most  musicians was known as a  lyra or citharis by today's terminology.  The Greeks had a legend from which this instrument appeared.  The story involves two Greek gods, Hermes and Apollo.  Hermes stole a couple of cows from Apollo.  As Hermes is on his way home from his thievery he stops to pick up a turtle.   Hermes gutted the turtle and stretched cowhide over the opening.  He then took a stick and put it through the front opening and the rear opening.  He connected string of gut to the front of the stick and the rear of the stick.  When Apollo found Hermes he  was so impressed with this music Hermes was making from this device, Apollo traded the rest of his cattle for it.  Some hold that the lyre invented by Hermes has seven strings; others that it had three only, to correspond with the seasons, or four to correspond with the quarters  of the year, and Apollo brought the number up to seven.  This instrument had evolved  greatly from this crude instruments as the Greek age progressed.         In the seventh  century BC  two new words entered the Greek vocabulary, lyra and citharis.  The ancient music philosopher aristoxenus (fourth century BC) stated that the words cithara and the citharis might sound similar but describe two different instruments.  The cithara was a much heavier and complicated instrument imported from western Asia.   The cithara has a U-shaped arms with a massive wooden chest.  The cithara was capable of producing  a  tone with much greater volume then compared to the citharis. The citharis  was a light instrument with the tortoise body .   To avoid the confusion with the name the Greeks renamed the citharis as the lyre.         Even though the cithera was known as the instrument of superior volume and tone the lyra was still popular.   The lyra reigned as the chief instrument of the public games and religious festivals of  Greece and Rome.  The lyra remained as the folk guitar of  Greece and Rome.  The Cithara because of its complexity and  craftsmanship became a status symbol as much as it was an instrument.  "A certain Evangelos...appeared at the Pithian games with a cithara of pure gold adorned with pearls and carved stones( it must of had a terrible tone)".      The lute  also had  its foundation in the Greek period of history.  Known to the Greeks as the pandoura this musical device was also fashioned from a turtle shell. The great  innovation of the lute was the fingerboard.  " Both the harp   and the lyre were designed to produce  only one note per string ", but the lute with a few strings could produce many different tones by fretting the strings against the fingerboard.