that play in the range of the tenor
trumpet.A Roman brass instrument consisting of a long tube turning in upon itself at the end and thus producing the shape of the letter ‘J’ (it is classified as an Aerophone). Pictorial representations indicate that it had a large detachable mouthpiece. Sachs's contention that it derived from the Celtic Carnyx, a similarly shaped instrument, is not widely accepted: it was known to the Etruscans long before the Romans had any significant contact with the Celts. Indeed the instrument is now looked upon as being distinctly Etruscan–Roman since it is unusual among ancient instruments, with no counterpart among the Greeks, Egyptians or Mesopotamian peoples (most ancient instruments follow a general progress from east to west in the Mediterranean basin).
The earliest extant picture of a lituus occurs in a mural from the Tomba della Scimmia in Chiusi (dating from the early 5th century bce). A number of instruments survive, including one found in 1827 in a grave at Caere (now in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco at the Vatican); this example is approximately 1·5 metres long and sounds six pitches of the overtone series based on G.
Etruscan and early Roman representations of the lituus show it in processions, especially funeral processions, the pompae funebres (for illustration see Tibia). Players in these processions were described as siticines, a generic term embracing the players of various instruments: liticines (lituus players), tubicines (trumpet players) and cornicines (horn players). In Roman literature the lituus, like most brass instruments, had mainly military associations. The abundant artistic representations of Roman military scenes, however, show the lituus only rarely. Behn suggested in explanation of this apparent contradiction that the lituus was used at cohort rather than at legionary level. Presumably, therefore, it would not have appeared in column reliefs and other monumental sources where only higher military orders were more likely to have been celebrated. Another possibility, raised by Wille, is that the term lituus may often have been used loosely as a substitute for tuba. The evidence supporting this includes the remark in Noctes atticae (Aulus Gellius, c130–180 ce) that ‘Virgil uses this word in place of tuba’ (v.8.11). More recently, Meucci has argued that about the turn of the 1st century the lituus was replaced in military usage by the Buccina, a smaller instrument derived from the horn of an animal that was more practical for the cavalry; poets, however, continued to use lituus to describe the more prosaic buccina.
In
post-classical times the term lituus has been applied to other wind
instruments, notably 18th-century brass. An inventory of 1706 formerly in
Ossegg monastery (now Osek), Bohemia, mentions ‘Litui vulgo Waldhorner duo ex
Tono G’; Bach's Cantata no.118 calls for two litui in B that play in the range of the tenor
trumpet.
C. Sachs: ‘Lituus und Karnyx’, Festschrift … Rochus Freiherrn von Liliencron (Leipzig, 1910/R), 241–6
C. Sachs: Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1913/R, enlarged 2/1964)
F. Behn: Musikleben im Altertum und frühen Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1954)
G. Fleischhauer: Etrurien und Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1964, 2/1978)
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967)
R. Meucci: ‘Roman Military Instruments and the Lituus’, GSJ, xlii (1989), 85–99
JAMES W. McKINNON