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was bellows-operated. Dio does not seem to know a name for the instrument; but both a Greek and a Latin word for a bagpiper were current in Italy.119 In the following century a papyrus fragment from the Arsinoite nome of Egypt unexpectedly presents no less than nine bagpipers in a list of musicians (all pipers of various kinds) and others.120 |
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A much earlier allusion to a Greek bagpipe has been suspected in a passage of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, where a Spartan character calls to an attendant to take up the 'puffers' (phusateria) so that he can sing and perform one of his native dances. An Athenian endorses the appeal, saying 'Yes, yes, take up the phusallides'. The first word could refer equally well to ordinary blown pipes or to bellows, while the second is elsewhere used of puffed-up things such as foam bubbles, and would seem more appropriate to something visibly swelling when inflated than to plain auloi. On the other hand, if some sort of Spartan bagpipe is meant, it is hard to see why phusallis, which would denote the bag, is in the plural.121 |
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The panpipe consists of a set of tubes of reed or other material, with no finger-holes but each having a different resonating length and so yielding a different note, all fastened together side by side. They are stopped up at the lower end (at least in Europe) and played by blowing across the open upper end. The Greek name for the instrument is syrinx, a term which we have already met with a different connotation in connection with the aulos. Since it basically means |
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119Ascaules, CIL 4.636 (graffito in a Pompeian brothel) and Mart. 10. 3. 8; utricularius, Suet. Ner. 54. The Dio passage is Or. 71.9 (ii. 184. 3 Arnim). Galen iv. 459 K. speaks of 'blowing askoi (skin bags)'. |
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120 G. A. Petropoulos, Papyri Societatis Archaeologicae Atheniensis i (1939), no. 43 verso (AD 131-2). |
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121 Ar. Lys. 1242-6. There is nothing at all to be said for seeing a reference to Theban bagpipes in another Aristophanic passage, Ach. 863 (Bergler, van Leeuwen). A 5 cm. tube, tapered at one end, with a bore reducing from 12 to 8 mm., found at Ephesus and dating from before 550, was described by D. G. Hogarth as 'mouthpiece of bagpipe(?)' (Excavations at Ephesus: The Archaic Artemisia, 194 and pl. XXXVII), but nothing seems to point particularly to this identification. Ps.-Arist. Pr. 19. 50 remarks that an inflated skin bag will sound an octave lower than another of half the size; but the reference is more likely to drumming than to bagpiping. |
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