In 2026 SoulTech Solutions became Kithara. Same company, same engineer, a name with more of my life in it.
The kithara was the concert instrument of ancient Greece. Amateurs learned the lyra, a small lyre built on a tortoise shell. The kithara belonged to professionals: kitharodes, who sang to their own playing, toured, and competed for some of the richest prizes of their world.
Its name is also the root of the word guitar, the instrument I’ve played professionally for most of my life. A working musician’s instrument, for a working engineer’s company.
Same root, other branches: zither, and the medieval cittern and gittern.
An honest footnote: the guitar inherited the name, not the body. Its shape comes from the lute family. A few makers later tried to give it the body back: the lyre-guitar puts kithara arms on a guitar.
The kithara’s string count changed slowly, and never without an argument. Sparta, it turns out, ran change control.
Tradition credits Terpander with fixing the kithara at seven strings, and with winning the first music contest at Sparta’s Carneia festival.
A later story says an oracle sent him to Sparta when the city was tearing itself apart in a civil feud, and that his music ended it. True or not, Sparta treated his seven strings as the spec for the next two centuries.
Phrynis was the virtuoso of the 5th century BC. Around 445 BC he won the first music contest Pericles added to the Panathenaic festival in Athens, playing a nine-string kithara in a newer, looser style that traditionalists couldn’t stand.
Then he played Sparta. The magistrate Ecprepes heard him, took a blade to the instrument, and cut two of the nine strings. He did give Phrynis one choice: lose the top two, or the bottom two.
Ancient extended-range players were warned.
Phrynis’s student went further: eleven strings by most accounts, and music wild enough to scandalize his elders. A surviving fragment of his verse reads like every engineer who ever rewrote legacy code: I don’t sing the old songs, my new ones are better.
A later tradition says Sparta formally censured him for adding strings and corrupting the youth. That decree is almost certainly invented. People quote it anyway.
Arion was the most famous kitharode of his day, the star of Periander’s court at Corinth. He toured Italy and Sicily, came home rich, and somewhere at sea the crew decided to kill him for the money.
He asked for one last performance. He put on his full stage costume, stood on the stern, sang a high hymn to Apollo, and jumped. In Herodotus’s telling a dolphin carried him to shore. When the sailors reached Corinth claiming Arion had stayed behind in Italy, Periander brought them face to face with him.
Nero trained seriously as a kitharode. He did vocal exercises lying on his back with a lead plate on his chest, and in AD 66–67 he toured Greece, entering every great festival.
Suetonius says nobody could leave the theater while the emperor sang: women gave birth in their seats, and men faked their own deaths to be carried out. Cassius Dio counts 1,808 victory crowns. The lesson keeps: too much power and no honest critics will get you a perfect record you can’t trust.
1,000 dr.The gold crown for first prize in kithara-singing at the Panathenaia, when a drachma was about a day’s pay for a skilled craftsman.
IG II² 2311 · Image: Walters Art Museum, 48.2107, CC0Before that year Delphi’s Pythian Games had no athletics. The oldest contest was a hymn to Apollo, sung to the kithara.
Pausanias 10.7In the Greek Bible, the harp David played to calm King Saul is a kithara.
1 Samuel 16:23, Septuagint