Clitellae
κανθήλια
Clitellae (κανθήλια), a pair of panniers, and therefore only used in the plural number. (Hor. Sat. 1.5, 47; Plaut. Most. 3.2, 91.) In Italy they were commonly used with mules or asses, but in other countries they were also applied to horses, of which an instance is given in the annexed woodcut from the Column of Trajan; and Plautus (ib. 94) figuratively describes a man upon whose shoulders a load of any kind, either moral or physical, is charged, as homo clitellarius.
Clitellae is also the name of an instrument of torture, and (propter similitudinem) of a place in Rome, and of some depressions in the Via Flaminia (Festus, s. v.). Κανθήλια is also used for a large basket in which grapes were carried at vintages (Artem. 4.6; Geop. 6.11, Hesych.), and for the curved wooden framework sometimes erected in the stern of a man-of-war to carry an awning, which was used as a statecabin for the στρατηγὸς or trierarch (Hesych.; Pollux, 1.89).
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.