(fl Alexandria, 3rd century bce). Greek inventor. According to earlier scholarship, he was active during the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes I (246–221 bce). A review of the evidence by Perrot, however, supports the conclusion that he was active about 270 bce, the period of Ptolemy Philadelphus. He enjoyed wide fame in antiquity for his mechanical devices operated by the pressure of water or air. Often these were elaborate toys created to amuse the court: one such was a water-clock, with sounding trumpets among its ingenious fittings, made for Ptolemy's queen Arsinoë.
The most famous and significant of Ctesibius's inventions was the Hydraulis, or water-organ. While some references fail to establish him precisely as its discoverer, his claim is strengthened by the weight of the total evidence and the lack of any satisfactory alternative theory. Farmer argued that the case for Ctesibius is supported by the existence of an Alexandrian treatise, surviving only in Arabic translation; this describes and illustrates a hydraulic musical device of a type much earlier than that described by Vitruvius or by Hero of Alexandria. His attempt, however, to identify the author, a certain Muristus (whose name exists in several variant forms), with Ctesibius is highly conjectural and involves difficulties.
No description of the hydraulis by Ctesibius himself has survived. According to reasonable modern conjecture, a lever-actuated piston forced air into a chamber partially filled with water and thence to the pipes. Lucretius (On Nature, v.332–7) and Cicero (Tusculan Disputations, iii.18.43) wrote admiringly of the hydraulis, which achieved great popularity in Rome, and in the first years of the Empire Vitruvius attempted to describe it. He spoke of a wind chest divided into four, six or eight air channels – the limitation to the octave is noteworthy – and gave a detailed account of a mechanism in which keys set slide valves in motion to open or close the passage of air to the pipes (On Architecture, x.8.2, 6). A Roman hydraulis dating from 228 ce, very close to the date of Athenaeus’s description of the instrument (174a, e) has been unearthed at Aquincum, near modern Budapest. Ctesibius's invention, essentially an elaboration of the panpipes, may be viewed as a distant ancestor of the immensely complex modern pipe organ.
P. Tannery: ‘Athénée sur Ctésibios et l'hydraulis’, Revue des études grecques, ix (1896), 23–7
P. Tannery: ‘L'invention de l'hydraulis’, Revue des études grecques, xxi (1908), 326–32
H. Diels: Antike Technik (Leipzig, 1920), 198–204
H.G. Farmer: The Organ of the Ancients from Eastern Sources, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic (London, 1931), 15ff, 60ff, 127–36
A.G. Drachmann: Ktesibios, Philon und Heron (Copenhagen, 1948; Eng. trans., 1963)
J. Perrot: L'orgue de ses origines hellénistiques à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1965; Eng. trans., 1971), 6–17, 23–6, 143–7
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967)
W. Walcker-Mayer: Die römische Orgel von Aquincum (Stuttgart, 1970; Eng. trans., 1972)
G. Wille: Ein führung in das römische Musikleben (Darmstadt, 1977), 137–8
J.G. Landels: Engineering in the Ancient World (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978), esp. 75–6, 127–9
A. Barker, ed.: Greek Musical Writings, i: The Musician and his Art (Cambridge, 1984), 259–62 [trans. of Athenaeus's description of the hydraulis]
R. Hammerstein: Macht und Klang: tönende Automaten als Realität und Fiktion in der alten und mittelalterlichen Welt (Berne, 1986)
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN