Page:EB1911 - Volume 06.djvu/411

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CITATION—CITHARA
395


whereof is that of Abbé E. Vacandard (1895); also in the Life of St Stephen Harding, in the English Saints. See also Henry Collins (one of the Oxford Movement, who became a Cistercian), Spirit and Mission of the Cistercian Order (1866). The facts are related in Helyot, Hist. des ordres religieux (1792), v. cc. 33-46, vi cc. 1, 2. Useful sketches, with references to the literature, are supplied in Herzog, Realencyklopädie (ed. 3), art. “Cistercienser”; Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon (ed. 2), art. “Cistercienserorden”; Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1896), i. §§ 33, 34. Prof. Brewer’s discriminating, yet on the whole sympathetic, Preface to vol. iv. of the Works of Giraldus Cambrensis (Rolls Series of Chronicles and Memorials) is very instructive. Denis Murphy’s Triumphalia Monasterii S. Crucis (1891) contains a general sketch, with a particular account of the Irish Cistercians.  (E. C. B.) 

CITATION (Lat. citare, to cite), in law, a summons to appear, more particularly applied in England to process in the probate and divorce division of the high court. In the ecclesiastical courts, citation was a method of commencing a probate suit, answering to a writ of summons at common law, and it is now in English probate practice an instrument issuing from the principal probate registry, chiefly used when a person, having the superior right to take a grant, delays or declines to do so, and another having an inferior right desires to obtain a grant; the party having the prior right is cited to appear and either to renounce the grant or show cause why it should not be decreed to the citator. In divorce practice, when a petitioner has filed his petition and affidavit, he extracts a citation, i.e. a command drawn in the name of the sovereign and signed by one of the registrars of the court, calling upon the alleged offender to appear and make answer to the petition. In Scots law, citation is used in the sense of a writ of summons. The word in its more general literary sense means the act of quoting, or the referring to an authority in support of an argument.


CÎTEAUX, a village of eastern France, in the department of Côte d’Or, 16 m. S.S.E. of Dijon by road. It is celebrated for the great abbey founded by Robert, abbot of Molesme, in 1098, which became the headquarters of the Cistercian order. The buildings which remain date chiefly from the 18th century and are of little interest. The church, destroyed in 1792, used to contain the tombs of the earlier dukes of Burgundy.


CITHAERON, now called from its pine forests Elatea, a famous mountain range (4626 ft.) in the south of Boeotia, separating that state from Megaris and Attica. It was famous in Greek mythology, and is frequently mentioned by the great poets, especially by Sophocles. It was on Cithaeron that Aetaeon was changed into a stag, that Pentheus was torn to pieces by the Bacchantes whose orgies he had been watching, and that the infant Oedipus was exposed. This mountain, too, was the scene of the mystic rites of Dionysus, and the festival of the Daedala in honour of Hera. The carriage-road from Athens to Thebes crosses the range by a picturesque defile (the pass of Dryoscephalae, “Oak-heads”), which was at one time guarded on the Attic side by a strong fortress, the ruins of which are known as Ghyphto-kastro (“Gipsy Castle”). Plataea is situated on the north slope of the mountain, and the strategy of the battle of 479 B.C. was considerably affected by the fact that it was necessary for the Greeks to keep their communications open by the passes (see Plataea). The best known of these is that of Dryoscephalae, which must then, as now, have been the direct route from Athens to Thebes. Two other passes, farther to the west, were crossed by the roads from Plataea to Athens and to Megara respectively.  (E. Gr.) 


CITHARA (Assyrian chetarah; Gr. κιθάρα; Lat. cithara; perhaps Heb. kinura, kinnor), one of the most ancient stringed instruments, traced back to 1700 B.C. among the Semitic races, in Egypt, Assyria, Asia Minor, Greece and the Roman empire, whence the use of it spread over Europe. The main feature of the Greek kithara, its shallow sound-chest, being the most
Fig. 1.—Nero Citharoedus (Mus.
 Pio-Clementino
), showing back of a
 Roman Cithara.
important part of it, is also that in which developments are most noticeable; its contour varied considerably during the many musical ages, but the characteristic in respect of which it fore-shadowed the precursors of the violin family, and by which they were distinguished from other contemporary stringed instruments of the middle ages, was preserved throughout in all European descendants bearing derived names. This characteristic box sound-chest (fig. 1) consisted of two resonating tables, either flat or delicately arched, connected by ribs or sides of equal width. The cithara may be regarded as an attempt by a more skilful craftsman or race to improve upon the lyre (q.v.), while retaining some of its features. The construction of the cithara can fortunately be accurately studied from two actual specimens found in Egypt and preserved in the museums of Berlin and Leiden. The Leiden cithara (fig. 2), which forms part of the d’Anastasy Collection in the Museum of Antiquities, is in a very good state of preservation. The sound-chest, in the form of an irregular square (17 cm. × 17 cm.), is hollowed out of a solid block of wood from
Fig. 2.—Ancient Egyptian Cithara from Thebes. Museum of Antiquities, Leiden.
the base, which is open; the little bar, seen through the open base and measuring 21/2 cm. (1 in.), is also of the same piece of wood. The arms, one short and one long, are solid and are fixed to the body by means of wooden pins; they are glued as well for greater strength. W. Pleyte, through whose courtesy the sketch was revised and corrected, states that there are no indications on the instrument of any kind of bridge or attachment for strings except the little half-hoop of iron wire which passes through the base from back to front. To this the strings were probably attached, and the little bar performed the double duty of sound-post and support for strengthening the tail-piece and enabling it to resist the tension of the strings. The oblique transverse bar, rendered necessary by the increasing length of the strings, was characteristic of the Egyptian cithara,[1] whereas the Asiatic and Greek instruments were generally constructed with horizontal bars resting on arms of equal length, the pitch of the strings being varied by thickness and tension, instead of by length. (For the Berlin cithara see Lyre.)

The number of strings with which the cithara was strung varied from 4 to 19 or 20 at different times; they were added less for the purpose of increasing the compass in the modern sense than to enable the performer to play in the different modes of the Greek musical system. Terpander is credited with having increased the number of strings to seven; Euclid, quoting him as his authority, states that “loving no more the tetrachordal chant, we will sing aloud new hymns to a seven-toned phorminx.”

What has been said of the scale of the lyre applies also to the cithara, and need therefore not be repeated here. The strings were vibrated by means of the fingers or plectrum (πλῆκτρον, from πλήσσειν, to strike; Lat. plectrum, from plango, I strike). Twanging with the fingers for strings of gut, hemp or silk was undoubtedly the more artistic method, since the player was able to command various shades of expression which are impossible


  1. A drawing of an Egyptian cithara, similar to the Leiden specimen, may be seen in Champollion, Monuments de l’Égypte et de la Nubie, ii. pl. 175.