Ancient Roman wind instrument (an Aerophone). It is occasionally referred to as a fistula (Lat.: ‘pipe’). In construction and function it is substantially the same as the Greek Aulos; the existing differences resulted from the divergent histories of the two nations. The tibia played a very prominent role in Etruscan life, appearing with conical bell-extensions on the pipes to increase the volume. Professional players performed during the lying-in-state, sacrificial rites and magic lamentations for the dead, and a tibia would often lead the dance in banquet scenes, accompany a boxing match, follow the hunt or even accompany the scourging of slaves. The instrument formed an essential ingredient in marriage ceremonies. It was equally important to the early Romans. Ovid's verses, which relate that ‘the tibia sang in the temples, it sang in the games, it sang at mournful funeral rites’, are corroborated by the abundant iconographic evidence showing it being played in precisely those circumstances (see illustration) and also in wedding processions, at formal meals and as an accompaniment to manual work.
Roman tibia players (tibicines) were organized during the republic in the guild-like collegium tibicinum romanorum. Plutarch listed the tibicines as the first of the trade groups organized by the ancient Roman king Numa. There is an element of myth about this, but nevertheless it affirms the long-standing importance of the tibia, as does the legend of the tibia players' strike, told by both Ovid and Livy. In 309 bce the tibia players were discontented because certain of their privileges had been curtailed – in Livy's version, their ancient custom of eating in the Temple of Jupiter – and they therefore went into voluntary exile at Tibur. The Senate, distressed that the sacred rites might be unaccompanied by tibia playing, managed to get the players drunk, load them into a cart and return them to Rome before they had recovered full consciousness. Their former privileges were restored, and in addition the tibicines were permitted once a year to go about the city in full regalia playing their instruments; this was the origin of the mid-June festival called the Quinquatrus minores.
In 204 bce, during the second Punic War, the orgiastic cult of the Asiatic Magna Mater Cybele was introduced at Rome. Festivals lasting several days were held each year to commemorate the dedication of her temple on the Aventine. The cult image of the goddess was carried to the music of cymbala, tympana and cornua. A particular variation of the tibia, the ‘Phrygian aulos’, was associated with the cult, a type in which one of the two pipes was longer than the other and terminated in an abrupt hook-like semicircle. (For illustration see Aulos, fig.2.) The Romans referred to it as the tibia berecyntia after a Phrygian mountain, sacred to Cybele. It was also played during the orgiastic dances of the priests in the temples. The instrument was prominent in Roman literature and iconography and appeared also in the cult of Dionysus and in the theatre.
Its theatrical use again followed Etruscan precedent. By the time of Plautus (c254–185 bce), tibicines performed a prelude at the beginning of the play, accompanied the sung portions (cantica) and certain spoken verse passages, providing also music between the acts and accompaniments for dance interludes. Tibicines from the slave classes were commissioned to compose the music for Plautus's Stichus and for the six surviving comedies of Terence (c190–159 bce).
During the later republic and early empire members of the municipal Roman collegium tibicinum were freedmen, whereas the trumpeters of the state religion held the rank of priest. With the conquest of Macedonia in 167 bce and the destruction of Corinth in 146 bce Greek actors and musicians had flooded to Italy, and guilds of ‘Dionysiac artists’ provided all the personnel needed for staging public festivals. This increase in theatrical activity, with which went an improved social status for actors and players, induced even emperors to compete with professional musicians. So the tibia gained the loftiest patrons and devotees.
Apart from its religious use, the tibia of imperial times seems to have been played mostly in the theatre, where a prominent figure was the scabillarius, a kind of theatrical music director who played the tibia while beating time with his foot on the Scabellum. Meanwhile the tibia was developed in size and technical capacity like other Roman instruments: one illustration of tibia shows pipes over a metre in length. Only one factor limited its role in comparison with the Greek aulos: the general richness and variety of Roman wind instruments, such as the tuba (see Tuba (ii)), Cornu and Lituus with their obvious suitability for military and ceremonial functions, and the remarkable Hydraulis.
Since the Greek aulos had ethical connotations, it is important to question whether the Roman tibia had them also. There seems almost to have been a reversal of the Greek ideas. In republican Rome the memory of the ancient and honourable history of the tibia gave it a quasi-sacred status whereas the Kithara was looked upon by the conservative and agrarian Romans as a symbol of Greek refinement and luxury, recently imported along with the other spoils of war from the sacking of Corinth in 146 bce. However, in time, the Greek string instruments came to be generally accepted; Horace put it thus: ‘And you, the tortoise [chelys lyra], at one time neither welcome nor much heard, are now cherished in the temples and at the tables of the rich’. Roman authors even went as far as echoing the Greek preference for the lyre to the aulos: Horace called the sound of the lyre Dorian and the sound of the tibia barbaric. But this was a literary conceit rather than a description of contemporary attitudes. Just as Greek ethical ideas were firmly rooted in actual Greek experience, so the central position the tibia occupied in Roman musical history prevented the development of any seriously negative ethical ideas concerning it.
It should be noted that Tinctoris (De inventione et usu musicae, c1486) used the term tibia to refer to a shawm.
See also Flute, §II, 4(i) and Organ stop.
A. Howard: ‘The Aulos or Tibia’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, iv (1893), 1–60
W. Vetter: ‘Tibia’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, 2nd ser., vi/1 (Stuttgart, 1936), 808–12
H. Hickmann: ‘The Antique Cross-Flute’, AcM, xxiv (1952), 108–112
G. Fleischhauer: Etrurien und Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1964, 2/1978)
H. Becker: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der antiken und mittelalterlichen Rohrblattinstrumente (Hamburg, 1966)
R. Meucci: ‘Aulos, tibia e doppio flauto: antichistica e folklore musicale’, NRMI, xx (1986), 626–32
A. Bélis: ‘Studying and Dating Ancient Greek Auloi and Roman Tibiae’, The Archeology of Early Music Cultures [II]: Berlin 1988, 233–48
JAMES W. McKINNON, ROBERT ANDERSON