(b Gadara, 110–100 bce; d ?Herculaneum, 40–35 bce). Epicurean philosopher, poet and critic of music. Philodemus went to Italy in about 65 bce and remained there until his death. He was the author of a treatise On Music, extensive parts of which have survived in a series of fragments discovered in the Herculaneum papyri, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 ce. Excavations beginning in the mid-18th century brought the first of the papyri to light, and attempts at a reconstruction of the treatise have been published since the end of the 18th century. In 1884 Johann Kemke established a text including additional material that had been discovered; he proposed that Philodemus's treatise was comprised of four books, the first of which was a doxography of the music theory of the Academy, the Peripatetics and the Stoics (including Diogenes of Babylon); the second (essentially lost) and third provided a fuller explanation of the theory of the Academy and the Peripatetics; and the fourth presented Philodemus's polemic against Diogenes and other Stoics. Until the 1980s Kemke's text was the basis for most modern scholarship, despite objections to his arrangement that were periodically raised on various grounds. With the later work of Rispoli, Neubecker and Delattre, however, Kemke's interpretation (and much of his text) has been largely supplanted. Delattre has proposed on papyrological and contextual grounds that all the fragments belong to the fourth book of Philodemus's On Music and that the treatise was not necessarily restricted to four books. In Delattre's reconstruction, the first 47 columns provide a summary of the theory of Diogenes of Babylon and the balance of the treatise is devoted to Philodemus's refutation of the arguments of the Stoics.
For Philodemus, music was irrational and so could not influence the soul in any choice or avoidance of action. When it accompanied a text, it added nothing but listening pleasure. In Philodemus's view, reports of the powerful effects of music are simple nonsense: music has never in itself manifested ethos, and it cannot be considered among things of serious worth.
Despite the dogmatism and excessive vehemence with which Philodemus sometimes pursues such arguments, his treatise has value, especially as a reflection of late stages in the development of ethos theory. Several passages add significantly to the ancient evidence regarding Damon. Existing scholarship evaluating the treatise, its arguments and the place of Philodemus will certainly be reviewed and most probably revised in light of Delattre's new complete critical edition (forthcoming).
J. Kemke, ed.: Philodemi de musica librorum quae exstant (Leipzig, 1884)
D.A. van Krevelen: Philodemus: De Muziek, met vertaling en commentar (Hilversum, 1939)
G.M. Rispoli, ed. and trans.: Il primo libro del Peri mousikēs de Filodemo (Naples, 1969)
G.M. Rispoli: ‘Filodemo sulla musica’, Cronache ercolanesi, iv (1974), 57–84
A.J. Neubecker, ed. and trans.: Philodemus: Über die Musik IV. Buch (Naples, 1986)
D. Delattre: ‘Philodème, de la musique: livre IV’, Cronache ercolanesi, xix (1989), 49–143
T. Gomperz: Zu Philodem's Büchern von der Musik: ein kritischer Beitrag (Vienna, 1885)
E. Holzer: ‘Zu Philodemos Peri mousikēs’, Philologus, lxvi (1907), 498–502
L.P. Wilkinson: ‘Philodemus on Ethos in Music’, Classical Quarterly, xxxii (1938), 174–81
O. Luschnat: Zum Text von Philodems Schrift De musica (Berlin, 1953)
A.J. Neubecker: Die Bewertung der Musik bei Stoikern und Epikureern: eine Analyse von Philodems Schrift De musica (Berlin, 1956)
A. Plebe: Filodemo e la musica (Turin, 1957)
W.D. Anderson: Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 153–76, 189–91
H. Schueller: The Idea of Music (Kalamazoo, MI, 1988), 92–4
G.M. Rispoli: ‘Elementi di fisica e di etica epicurea nella teoria musicale di Filodemo di Gadara’, Harmonia mundi: musica e filosofia nell'antichità: Rome 1989, 69–103
THOMAS J. MATHIESEN