Capisterium
Capisterium an instrument employed for cleansing the ears of corn after they had been threshed out and winnowed. It was used differently from the sieve (cribrum) and the winnowing shovel (pala, vannus); and was probably a wooden trough (alveus), into which the corn was put and shaken up, so that the heavy grains subsided to the bottom (Rich). Saglio suggests that these heavy grains may have been selected for sowing. (Col. 1.9, 11; Apul. Met. x. p. 193.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.