(b Athens, c429 bce; d Athens, 347 bce). Greek philosopher. His comments on music are of unusual interest, not only because his works provide much varied evidence but also because he was a transitional figure. During his lifetime the traditional Paideia (meaning both ‘education’ and ‘culture’), built upon unquestioned aristocratic standards of behaviour, had already fallen into decay; the conservative Aristophanes had lamented its neglect. Plato was no less conservative in his different way and was disquieted by the signs of things to come. The meeting of past and future in his writings lends his remarks on music a special interest, even when he was manifestly out of touch with his own times.
1. Attitude to musical instruments.
2. Number theory, ethos, harmonia.
7. Characteristics of Platonic thought.
8. Influence on his successors.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN
Among musical instruments, only the aulos and kithara commanded Plato’s serious attention. As the Crito (54d2–5) shows, he was aware that auletes could fill the consciousness of listeners with their playing. The passage refers indirectly to the buzzing sound of auloi and is probably Plato's nearest approach to a concern with tonal characteristics. Such questions, however, had little importance for him; it was because of its tonal flexibility, not its sound, that he banned the aulos from his ideal city-states projected in the Republic and the Laws. He credited it with the most extensive compass of any instrument and asserted that other ‘polychordic’ and ‘panharmonic’ instruments – those affording a wide variety of notes and harmoniai – only imitate it (Republic, iii, 399d4–5).
Plato's concern was not with the technical capacities of the instrument: he wished, rather, to eradicate what he considered an alien element in Greek religion. The aulos, said Socrates, is associated with the satyr Marsyas; we must follow the Muses in preferring kithara and lyra, the instruments of Apollo (Republic, iii, 399e1–3). Their acceptance represents a further part of the plan, evident in the Republic and especially in the Laws, to make music serve the state religion. As an exception herdsmen will be allowed to retain their traditional Syrinx (see Greece, §I, 5(ii)(b)).
Plato did not claim familiarity with technical theory, but in the Philebus he nevertheless referred to discordant elements being made ‘commensurable and harmonious by introducing the principle of number’ (25d11–e2), a notably Pythagorean sentiment. The same idea is put, negatively, later in the same work: without number and measurement, any art is at the mercy of guesswork and of an empirical reliance upon the senses (55e1–56a3). Here, as often, he was attacking the empirical harmonicists; yet his position was ambivalent, for he could also criticize the Pythagoreans (Republic, vii, 531a–b), whom he admired on many counts, for their exclusive interest in the numerical properties of musical consonances (see Greece, §I, 6).
According to Alcibiades in the Symposium, the aulos melodies attributed to Marsyas are incomparably powerful. Whether the performer is skilful or inept, they grip the soul and show ‘the need of gods and mysteries’ (215c1–6). The passage illustrates the exciting and orgiastic effect so often associated with the aulos. In an ideal community, where worship must above all be decorous, such an instrument can have no place. As might be expected, Socrates considered the power of music from a distinctly different approach. The qualities of rhythm and harmony, he explained, sink deep into the soul and remain there. The result is grace of body and mind, attainable in practice solely through the traditional system of literary and musical education known as mousikē (Republic, iii, 412a). Thus a man’s habits become his nature and are manifested as Ethos.
In the Timaeus, a dialogue concerned centrally with the motion of the soul, Plato proposed that harmonia has a comparable motion and helps to restore order and concord to the soul; similarly, that rhythm remedies our unmodulated condition (47c7–e2). (Harmonia, it must be remembered, is a broad philosophical term that has nothing to do with the modern concept of chord relationships.) Mousikē and philosophia ‘provide the soul with motion’; when this motion has been properly regularized, it blends high and low sounds into a unity that provides intellectual delight as an ‘imitation of the divine harmony revealed in mortal motions’ (80b4–8). In the Laws (vii, 802c6–d6) Plato held that pleasure is nevertheless irrelevant in itself: a man enjoys the music to which he is accustomed; while sober and ordered music makes men better, the vulgar and cloying sort makes them worse. Although the doctrines of the Timaeus seem to be related to Pythagorean theories of harmonic number, Plato never showed clearly how the soul could be affected by external patterns of motion related to it through harmonia. Indeed, this difficulty is part of a larger problem in Platonic philosophy: how the eternal and non-material can participate in the temporal and material realm.
Plato credited rhythm, metre and harmonia with a great inherent power to charm (Republic, x, 601a–b). Convinced that his ideal of education could be realized through their use, Plato nevertheless warned that they must remain subordinate to the text (Republic, iii, 398d). He saw the various rhythmic patterns as developments of impulses expressed through bodily movements; the harmoniai are analysed simply and briefly as ‘systems’ (Philebus, 17c11–d6). His own musical and literary training occurred at a period when he can hardly have gained any strong impression of earlier individual, unsystematized harmoniai. Moreover, the scale sequences presented in the treatise On Music (i.9) of Aristides Quintilianus as ‘called to mind’ by Plato in the Republic bear some resemblance to the ‘complete systems’ found in Greco-Roman handbooks (see Greece, §I, 6(iii)(e)).
Plato seldom named individual harmoniai, except in a noteworthy passage where he rejected all of them except the Dorian and Phrygian. The former serves to imitate the ‘tones and accents’ of a brave man under stress, the latter to portray moderate behaviour in prosperity, evidently through the same kind of Mimesis (Republic, iii, 399a–c). His choice had a reasoned basis in the religious observances of his own times and the severe limitations to be imposed upon music and poetry in the ideal city-state of his Republic. The Phrygian harmonia was strongly associated with Dionysiac worship, with the choral hymn to Dionysus known as the Dithyramb and also with the Aulos. In Plato’s own time, Dionysus was worshipped with sombre decorum.
In the Laws, a work of the writer’s old age, Plato treated the harmoniai less harshly than he did in the Republic; several passages seem to suggest that a variety would be permitted. (See notably Laws 670a–71a.) Still, he failed to give any satisfactory full account of the relation between the harmoniai and morals. Thus, in a well-known passage (Laws, ii, 669b–70b), Plato warned that a wrong handling of music could make the hearer liable to fall into evil habits. He further objected to the lack of taste and the meaningless virtuosity of solo instrumental performances, which seemed to him to have hardly any meaning or mimetic worth. Here the view of music as fostering evil is extreme, even for Plato. Elsewhere in the Laws (ii, 654b–d) he suggested that technical finish has secondary importance, a view far more in keeping with his general approach; yet even here his approach is as ambiguous as ever. His attitudes and theories, as expressed in isolated passages, still fail to combine satisfactorily into a philosophical system, however valuable they may be in isolation.
In these circumstances even the views of the musical expert Damon may well fail to provide a means of unifying Plato’s thought; in a significant number of respects Plato showed a critical and independent spirit where music was concerned.
As might be expected, the connection between music and legislation is established almost entirely in the Laws, although it is occasionally anticipated in earlier works. When he wrote the Republic Plato did not trust the power of written laws to maintain a wholesome culture. In the Republic, the musical topic of special interest had been paideutic ethos; it is now paideia itself, and, in particular, the place that music should have within it. Egypt, Crete, Sparta and the Athens of earlier days provided Plato with precedents for legislative controls over music. Probably the most striking result is his seemingly paradoxical claim that ‘our songs are our laws’ (Laws, vii, 799e). Earlier, Socrates had observed (Republic, iv, 424b–c) that ‘the modes [tropoi] of music are never moved without movement of the greatest constitutional laws’. The interpretation of these passages has been a matter of controversy, and there is certainly a play on the word nomos, which has both a general meaning of ‘law’, ‘custom’ or ‘convention’, as well as a specific musical meaning (see Nomos). Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose Plato regarded the influence of music on behaviour (for whatever reason) as so profound as to be a virtual ‘law’. Thus, in a literal sense, ‘song’ and ‘law’ were inseparable.
‘Rightness’ (orthotēs) has many aspects in the Laws and is perhaps the most important single concept bearing upon music in that vast work. Poets, Plato said, are in themselves unable adequately to recognize good and evil. They have unwittingly created the impression that rightness is not even a characteristic of music, let alone the true criterion; and that the true criterion is pleasure (Laws, iii, 700d–e).
In the ideal city of the Laws, no such debased standard could exist. Free choice of rhythms and melodies would be forbidden, and Plato would allow only those appropriate to texts equating virtue with the good (Laws, ii, 661c). None but the civic poet may express himself freely. He must be elderly and also distinguished for his noble deeds, but he need not be talented in poetry or music (Laws, viii, 829c–d). Power must be in the hands of the state. Musical contests will be judged by mature citizens (Laws, vi, 764d–e), and aged choristers must know harmoniai and rhythms in order to distinguish the rightness of a melody (Laws, ii, 670a–b). Evidently they will have to be more technically competent than the civic poet, and this fact serves as a reminder of Plato’s indecisiveness in choosing criteria. Elsewhere he seems to have been attempting to combine both kinds of prerequisites for music, for he conceded that music may indeed be judged by the pleasure it gives, providing it appeals to a listener of outstandingly noble character and paideia. This sort of man, he continued, must judge public performances (Laws, ii, 658e–59a). In this passage, as often elsewhere when he approached a musical topic in varying ways, his inconsistency has no final resolution.
In the Laws Plato proposed that musical and literary training should ensure that ‘the whole community may come to voice always one and the same sentiment in song, story and speech’ (Laws, ii, 664a). Plato pursued such uniformity relentlessly, and it is easy to ignore the admirable earnestness and idealism of his views concerning paideia. Education which is not uplifting is not education; men must constantly be exposed to an ethical code higher than their own (Laws, ii, 659c). In this process music has a vital role. From the civic point of view, for example, paideia is said to be a man’s training as a singer and dancer in the public chorus (Laws, ii, 654a). But Plato extended the meaning of paideia beyond mere dexterity: in the same context he claimed that true paideia is loving good and hating evil, and that technique matters little (Laws, ii, 654b–d). In the education of young children, as yet incapable of dealing maturely with moral issues, ideals of excellence will be conveyed through terms that can be understood, those of play and song (Laws, ii, 659d–e).
The comment is remarkable for the conscious grasp that it shows of the connection between paideia and play (paidia). Once again, much later in the Laws, Plato connected play with song and with dance as well. Man is ‘the plaything [paignion] of God’, he declared; this is the best thing about him, and he should therefore spend his life in ‘the noblest kinds of play’, sacrificing, singing and dancing (Laws, vii, 803c–04b). The central idea of orthotēs reappears here: these activities are cited to show rightness in practice. The religious emphasis is noteworthy and typical of Plato, as is the omission of any reference to solo instrumental music. (A musical accompaniment was taken for granted.)
The older, 5th-century education was designed primarily to produce seemly behaviour during the early years of schooling, according to the Platonic Protagoras (Protagoras, 325d–e; cf 326a–b for the actual system). In the Laws Plato himself made careful provision for elementary schooling; although he always considered paideia as a lifelong activity, he was aware that in this instance the beginning was indeed ‘half of all’.
Besides his general remarks on education, he dealt with lyre lessons in a remarkable passage (Laws, vii, 812d–e): the lyre must sound clearly and in unison with the voice, he declared; heterophony and ornamentation are forbidden, as are various types of exaggerated contrast. These comments are incomparably more technical than any others in the entire range of the dialogues. Plato excluded any kind of variation, rhythmic or melodic, in the accompaniment and any use of countermelody because he believed these interfere with the young pupils' ability to grasp ‘within three years the useful elements of music’ (en trisin etesi to tēs mousikēs chrēsimon).
Although Plato never developed an explicit theory of melodic mimesis, some of its constituent elements can be seen in his work. In his doctrine of habituation he taught that mimetic practices, if begun early in life, grow eventually into habits and become second nature (Republic, iii, 395d). He related this to music through his reference in the Laws (ii, 655a–b) to the separate melodies that characterize the brave man and the coward; and the two principles are combined in his description of rhythm and of music generally as ‘imitations of the characters of better and worse men' (Laws, vii, 798d). Since music is thus mimetic, we must judge it not by the degree to which it pleases, but by its rightness, the essential quality of successful mimesis (Laws, ii, 668a–b). Rhythms as well as harmoniai express these mimetic qualities, and in good music they take their pattern from the natural rhythm of a good man’s life (Republic, iii, 399a–e). One might have expected the parallel statement that in such music the harmonia expresses the inner harmonia of a good man, but he never stated this. The two acceptable harmoniai, Dorian and Phrygian, imitate (in a manner never explained) the ‘notes and songs’ (phthongous te kai prosōdias) of brave and moderate men; there is no analogy with any inner harmonia. He seems to have reasoned that harmonia must resemble rhythm in imitating certain human activities.
It was natural for Plato to associate music with spoken language, for he always championed the pre-eminence of the word; yet this combination involved him in a contradiction. He suggested that education is achieved, first by the two main musical elements, harmonia and rhythm, which impart a rhythmic and harmonious nature through habituation, and, secondly by the literary content, which produces traits of character closely related to the habits implanted by harmonia and rhythm but differing from them (Republic, vii, 522a). The contradiction lies in the fact that such character traits are ethical, whereas moral value is irrelevant to harmonia and rhythm. Plato generally recognized this, but he linked by association the ethical and non-ethical factors and even used ethical terms to describe the harmoniai.
In the dialogues Plato took a narrow view of the pleasure-giving function of music, for example, and his general understanding of musical developments was distinctly old-fashioned. On points of detail his presentation is often vague or incomplete; at times he contradicted himself. Yet he combined a singularly noble vision of the moral function of music with concern for its practical aspects. The ambivalence of his position between the old music and the new itself enabled him to draw upon the heritage of Pythagorean, Sophistic and Damonian thought and also to contribute profoundly, through his own remarkable powers, to the thought of the future. Severe but majestic, he was the last mourner of the traditional Hellenic musical ideals.
The passing of these ideals was also deplored by later critics, including Aristotle’s brilliant pupil, Aristoxenus. Like Plato, he saw the music of his own time as proof of an ethical decline; yet even here his view is not that of the zealous reformer, and elsewhere there are manifest differences. One of these concerns the Aristoxenian doctrine of rhythm. It certainly involves formal principles that essentially resemble Plato’s ideal paradigms; the dialogues nevertheless treat rhythm either as a divine gift or as a mimetic refining of the impulse towards decisive movement.
Hellenistic and Greco-Roman authors were increasingly concerned with cosmic number-relationships, derived from Pythagoras, rather than the aspects of Plato’s approach to mousikē derived from the observation of society or the physical nature of man. Plato’s doctrines of mimesis and ethos were preserved and reinterpreted by Neoplatonic theorists such as Aristides Quintilianus. Plotinus’s pupil Porphyry followed Neoplatonic tradition in insisting that the motion of the soul is vitally important for music; the soul itself he held to be a composite tuned to diatonic intervals, a view derived from the Timaeus and Phaedo.
The Church Fathers’ attitudes to music were principally based on Neoplatonic views; they sought persistently to press music into ecclesiastical service as an aid to individual salvation or a way of praising God. They nevertheless credited it with a power for evil and rejected secular music on moral grounds. Likewise, Philo conceptualized Jewish religious traditions in terms of Platonic philosophy, especially in his account of the formation of the world, while Islamic scholars attempted to harmonize their own theology with both Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. In the hands of Western commentators such as Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius and Calcidius and authors such as Boethius, Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville, fragments of Platonic theory were passed on to the Middle Ages, where they continued to exert an influence, especially on musica speculativa.
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For further bibliography see Greece, §I.