AULIS, an ancient Boeotian town on the Euripus, situated on a rocky peninsula between two bays, near the modern village of Vathy, about 3 m. S. of Chalcis. Its fame was due to the tradition that it was the starting-place of the Greek fleet before the Trojan War, the scene of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. The temple of Artemis was still to be seen in the time of Pausanias.


AULNOY (or Aunoy), MARIE CATHERINE LE JUMEL DE BARNEVILLE DE LA MOTTE, Baronne D’ (c. 1650-1705), French author, was born about 1650 at Barneville near Bourg-Achard (Eure). She was the niece of Marie Bruneau des Loges, the friend of Malherbe and of J.G. de Balzac, who was called the “tenth Muse.” She married on the 8th of March 1666 François de la Motte, a gentleman in the service of César, duc de Vendôme, who became Baron d’Aulnoy in 1654. With her mother, who by a second marriage had become marquise de Gudaigne, she instigated a prosecution for high treason against her husband. The conspiracy was exposed, and the two women saved themselves by a hasty flight to England. Thence they went (February 1679) to Spain, but were eventually allowed to return to France in reward for secret services rendered to the government. Mme. d’Aulnoy died in Paris on the 14th of January 1705. She wrote fairy tales, Contes nouvelles ou les Fées a la mode (3 vols., 1698), in the manner of Charles Perrault. This collection (24 tales) included L’Oiseau bleu, Finette Cendron, La Chatte blanche and others. The originals of most of her admirable tales are to be found in the Pentamerone (1637) of Giovanni Battista Basile. Other works are: L’Histoire d’Hippolyte, comte de Duglas (1690), a romance in the style of Madame de la Fayette, though much inferior to its model; Mémoires de la cour d’Espagne (1679-1681); and a Relation du voyage d’Espagne (1690 or 1691) in the form of letters, edited in 1874-1876 as La Cour et la ville de Madrid by Mme. B. Carey; Histoire de Jean de Bourbon (1692); Mémoires sur la cour de France (1692); Mémoires de la cour d’Angleterre (1695). Her historical writings are partly borrowed from existing records, to which she adds much that must be regarded as fiction, and some vivid descriptions of contemporary manners.

The Diverting Works of the Countess d’Anois, including some extremely untrustworthy “Memoirs of her own life,” were printed in London in 1707. The Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, with an introduction by Lady Thackeray Ritchie, appeared in 1892. For biographical particulars see M. de Lescure’s introduction to the Contes des Fées (1881).


AULOS (Gr. αὐλός; Lat. tibia; Egyptian hieroglyphic, Ma-it; medieval equivalents, shalm, chalumeau, schalmei, hautbois), in Greek antiquities, a class of wood-wind instruments with single or with double reed mouthpiece and either cylindrical or conical bore, thus corresponding to both oboe and clarinet. In its widest acceptation the aulos was a generic term for instruments consisting of a tube in which the air column was set in vibration either directly by the lips of the performer, or through the medium of a mouthpiece containing a single or a double reed. Even the pipes of the pan-pipes (syrinx polycalamus,[1] σῦριγξ πολυκάλαμος) were sometimes called auloi (αὐλοί). The aulos is also the earliest prototype of the organ, which, by gradual assimilation of the principles of syrinx and bag-pipe, reached the stage at which it became known as the Tyrrhenian aulos (Pollux iv. 70) or the hydraulos, according to the method of compressing the wind supply (see [Organ]: Early History; and [Syrinx]). The aulos in its earliest form, the reed pipe, during the best classical period had a cylindrical bore (κοιλία) like that of the modern clarinet, and therefore had the acoustic properties of the stopped pipe, whether the air column was set in vibration by means of a single or of a double reed, for the mouthpiece does not affect the harmonic series.[2] To the acoustic properties of open or stopped pipes are due those essential differences which underlie the classification of modern wind instruments. A stopped pipe produces its fundamental tone one octave lower than the tone of an open pipe of corresponding length, and overblows the harmonics of the twelfth, and of the third above the second octave of the fundamental tone, i.e. the odd numbers of the series; whereas the open pipe gives the whole series of harmonics, the octave, the twelfth, the double octave, and the third above it, &c.

To produce the diatonic scale throughout the octaves of its compass, the stopped pipe requires eleven lateral holes in the side of the pipe, at appropriate distances from each other, and from the end of the pipe, whereas the open pipe requires but six. The acoustic properties of the open pipe can only be secured in combination with a reed mouthpiece by making the bore conical. The late Romans (and therefore we may perhaps assume the Greeks also, since the Romans acknowledge their indebtedness to the Greeks in matters relating to musical instruments, and more especially to the cithara and aulos) understood the acoustic principle utilized to-day in making wind instruments, that a hole of small diameter nearer the mouthpiece may be substituted for one of greater diameter in the theoretically correct position. This is demonstrated by the 4th-century grammarian Macrobius, who says (Comm. in Somn. Scip. ii. 4, 5): “Nec secus probamus in tibiis, de quarum foraminibus vicinis inflantis ori sonus acutus emittitur, de longinquis autem et termino proximis gravior; item acutior per patentiora foramina, gravior per angusta” (see [Bassoon]). Aristotle gives directions for boring holes in the aulos, which would apply only to a pipe of cylindrical bore (Probl. xix. 23). At first the aulos had but three or four holes; to Diodorus of Thebes is due the credit of having increased this number (Pollux iv. 80). Pronomus, the musician, and teacher of Alcibiades (5th century B.C.), further improved the aulos by making it possible to play on one pair of instruments the three musical scales in use at his time, the Dorian, the Phrygian, and the Lydian, whereas previously a separate pair of pipes had been used for each scale (Pausanias ix. 12. 5; Athenaeus xiv. 31). These three modes would require a compass of a tenth in order to produce the fundamental octave in each.

There are two ways in which this increased compass might have been obtained: (1) by increasing the number of holes and covering up those not required, (2) by means of contrivances for lowering the pitch of individual notes as required. We have evidence that both means were known to the Greeks and Romans. The simplest device for closing holes not in use was a band of metal left free to slide round the pipe, and having a hole bored through it corresponding in diameter with the hole in the pipe. Each hole was provided with a band, which was in some cases prevented from slipping down the pipe by narrow fixed rings of metal. The line on fig. 1 between r and s is thought to have been one of these rings.

Some pipes had two holes pierced through the bands and the bone, in such a manner that only one could be exposed at a time. This is clearly shown in the diagram (fig. 1) of fragments of an aulos from the museum at Candia, for which the writer is greatly indebted to Professor John L. Myres, by whom measured drawings were made from the instrument in 1893. These highly interesting remains, judging from the closed end (5), seem to belong to a side-blown reed-pipe similar to the Maenad pipes in the Castellani collection at the British Museum, illustrated below; they are constructed like modern flutes, but played by means of a reed inserted into the lateral embouchure.