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the third book breaks off in mid-argument.7 Aristoxenus' harmonic theory was highly influential, and it is regurgitated in several works written probably between the second and fifth centuries AD, where lost portions of Aristoxenus' exposition are also reflected. These works are the Introductions to Harmonics of Cleonides and Gaudentius, the Introductions to Music of Bacchius and Alypius, and the much longer and more wide-ranging work On Music by Aristides Quintilianus. Cleonides' lucid handbook, formerly misattributed to Euclid, is the most purely Aristoxenian. |
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Other works of about Aristoxenus' time or soon after it are the Sectio Canonis or Division of the kanon, which may be a genuine work of Euclid's, and the (pseudo-)Aristotelian Problems. The Problems are a collection of about 900 scientific questions in the form 'Why is it that . . .' with reasoned suggestions for answers, arranged under thirty-eight headings and put together in the Peripatetic school. Two of the sections, the eleventh and nineteenth, are concerned with matters of acoustics and harmony respectively. The Sectio Canonis is a short treatment of harmony from the mathematical angle, the kanon being the graduated rule of a monochord which gives out different notes according to the length of the resonating section of the string. This approach is also represented in several works of the first half of the second century AD: Theon of Smyrna's Explanation of Mathematical Matters for Readers of Plato, Nicomachus of Gerasa's Harmonic Handbook, and, much more important, the Harmonics of Ptolemy. In the third century the Neoplatonist Porphyry wrote a commentary on Ptolemy's work. This too contains some useful matter. |
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The Epicurean philosopher Philodemus (first century BC) wrote a work on music which is partially preserved; it is a polemic against the view that music has ethical effects on the listener. Sextus Empiricus (AD c. 200) argues similarly in his essay Against the Musicians, which forms the sixth book of his Against the Scientists. The dialogue On Music which comes down to us as a work of Plutarch's, but is certainly not by him, is a source of unique value for the early history of Greek music, or at least for what was believed about it in the Classical period. Though itself lateper. haps of about Athenaeus' timeit cites excellent Classical authorities such as Glaucus of Rhegium |
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7 'Harmonics', in ancient terminology, is the science dealing with the ordered arrangement of notes in scales and the relationships between scales. It was not concerned like modern harmonic theory with chords and chord-successions. |
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