Author details/dating: N/A
Instrument Cited: War Trumpet (Salpinx)
Citation Reference: Paean 9
Citation Content: The lyric poet Bacchylides, in Ode 18 which has a military theme has the chorus saying :
King of sacred Athens, lord of the luxuriously-living Ionians, why has the bronze-belled salpinx just now sounded a war song?
In this extract, Baccylides has described the call of the salpinx as a war song perhaps indicating that he was aware of other calls on the instrument which were made in contexts other than war. Unfortunately, the caveat also clicks in here that he may have just been embellishing the text for poetic reasons. Nevertheless, in this case, as the next line of the dithyramb reads ‘Does some enemy of our land beset our borders, leading an army?’ it seems most-likely that the addition of the term war to the call of the salpinx was designed to convey the image of an impending attack.
With references such as this, it is difficult to interpret the terms used by authors with great certainty. Bacchylides uses the compound adjective chalkokodon to refer to the type of salpinx which raises the possibility that the kalko term does not specifically refer to the salpinx but that it is the compound term which does this. This might suggest, therefore, that he is describing a particular stable form of the instrument which normally had a bronze bell.
Reference: Verrall 1884: p 81; Behn dates this as beginning of 5th century BCE. Behn 1954: p 81;Krentz 1999: p.114
Modern source: English - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0064:book=Dith:poem=18&highlight=trumpet