Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.

There can in any case be no doubt that some of those men whose wisdom is a household word have been earnest students of music: Pythagoras for instance and his followers popularised the belief, which they no doubt had received from earlier teachers, that the universe is constructed on the same principles which were afterwards imitated in

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the construction of the lyre, and not content merely with emphasising that concord of discordant elements which they style harmony attributed a sound to the motions of the celestial bodies. [*]( The music of the spheres: cp. the vision of Er in Plato ( Rcp. 10) and the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero. The sounds produced by the heavenly bodies correspond to the notes of the heptachord. )

As for Plato, there are certain passages in his works, more especially in the Timaeus, [*](Tim. p. 47. ) which are quite unintelligible to those who have not studied the theory of music. But why speak only of the philosophers, whose master, Socrates, did not blush to receive instruction in playing the lyre even when far advanced in years?