Abstract
On one of the reliefs in the famous Passage of the Theoria Apollo is depicted holding aloft a cithara, all of whose parts, detached from the wall, are today broken (left upright strut above the crosspiece and the whole right-hand section of the instrument). If a reconstruction drawing of how the complete cithara originally looked is made on the basis of the surviving elements, it can be seen that it is more squat and less high than similar instruments generally are, a large number of which are depicted on red-figure vases, with the dates usually proposed by sculpture experts to place the Theoria relief in a chronological context. The cithara that we see is closer in its proportions to the slightly earlier ones which appear on black-fîgure pottery at around 490 B. C. The form and type of the Theoria cithara thus argue in favour of a high date for the whole monument.