What was music like in antiquity? Today, we will explore the story of the man who is our primary source of knowledge about the music of Classical-Hellenistic Greece. He was a Peripatetic philosopher, a student of Aristotle, who was displeased when Aristotle chose someone else as his successor to lead the school. He healed by playing the flute, and his only preserved work, Elementa harmonica, is the oldest known musical treatise. His name was Aristoxenus of Tarentum.

Naturally, he was from Taras, present-day Taranto, which is now part of Italy but was then a city of Magna Graecia (southern Italy), where he was born around 354 B.C. He later moved to the Greek city of Mantinea in Arcadia. His turn to philosophy and music wasn’t accidental, as his father, Spintharus (or Mnesias, according to other sources), had been none other than a disciple of Socrates and was the one who taught him the art of the Muse Euterpe.

In addition to his father, Aristoxenus had other notable teachers. One was his close friend Xenophilus, a philosopher, mathematician, and musician from Chalcidice who lived in the Syracuse of the tyrant Dionysius II the Younger, and from whom he learned Pythagorean doctrine (he is the only Pythagorean known in Athens of the fourth century B.C.), a philosophical-religious movement founded by Pythagoras of Samos in the mid-sixth century B.C., based on the belief that mathematics is the essence of all things and was the origin of irrational numbers (numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions and have non-repeating, non-terminating decimal expressions).

Aristoxenus
Imaginary portrait of Aristoxenus on an Italian book cover. Credit: Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

According to Pliny the Elder, possibly referencing a quote by Aristoxenus, Xenophilus lived an incredibly long life: one hundred and five years without ever falling ill. This, and another statement attributed to his disciple that the best way to educate a child is to make them a citizen of a well-governed state, made him popular during the Renaissance. But Xenophilus wasn’t the only one from whom Aristoxenus learned; another was Lampro of Erythrae, the man who taught music to the famous playwright Sophocles, as he was an expert lyre player and dancer.

It’s worth noting a chronological discrepancy, as Lampro lived in the early fifth century B.C. and could not have lived long enough to have Aristoxenus as a student. It’s possible that Aristoxenus’ teacher was another with the same name, or that he was conflated with the earlier Lampro to emphasize Aristoxenus’ connection with traditional Greek music in contrast to the New Music that was beginning to take hold, the dithyramb (a lyric composition, originally for Dionysian rituals but later expanded, with elaborate language and performed by a choir without masks, with works composed by Lasus of Hermione, Simonides of Ceos, Bacchylides, and even Pindar).

Lampro, who led a very austere lifestyle that extended to his music, belonged to the Peripatetic school, named Peripatos in reference to the peripatoi, the covered walkways of the Lyceum, a garden adjacent to the Athenian temple of Apollo Lyceius where they strolled while reflecting and debating on life. The head of the Peripatos was Aristotle, who gathered around him a circle of followers, the most prominent of whom were Theophrastus, Eudemus of Rhodes, and Aristoxenus himself.

In later centuries, two more philosophers joined the Peripatetics: Straton of Lampsacus, tutor of Ptolemy II, who would direct the Peripatos, steering it toward natural sciences, and Andronicus of Rhodes, another head of the school in the first century B.C. (it remained active for ten generations and was revived in late Roman times), who coined the term “metaphysics.” However, the accounts that have come down to us about the relationship between Aristoxenus and Aristotle are contradictory and shed little light on their connection.

Aristotle
The School of Aristotle, by Gustav Adolph Spangenberg. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The Suda (a tenth-century A.D. Byzantine encyclopedia about the ancient Mediterranean world) states that Aristoxenus insulted his master upon his death because he was not named successor to lead the school, preferring Theophrastus instead. However, Aristocles of Messene, another Peripatetic philosopher from the second century A.D. (tutor of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and teacher of Alexander of Aphrodisias, a famous commentator on Aristotle’s works), claims that Aristoxenus always showed meticulous respect towards Aristotle.

It is impossible to discern who was right. Experts believe they know why Aristotle preferred Theophrastus to lead the school: as mentioned before, Aristoxenus was strongly influenced by Pythagoreanism —after all, two of the greatest Pythagoreans, Archytas and Philolaus, were also from his hometown of Taras—and only followed Aristotelian doctrine to the extent that it, in turn, drew from Pythagoras and Plato. His works reflect this philosophical inclination starting with the titles themselves and showcase the political conservatism characteristic of Pythagorean doctrine.

In the second century B.C., Apollonius the Paradoxographer (paradoxography is a Hellenistic literary genre that narrates abnormal or inexplicable phenomena, both of the natural and human world) wrote a work titled Mirabilia (also Historiae mirabiles, or Marvelous Histories) that compiled texts from earlier authors, including Peripatetics like Aristotle and Theophrastus, and relates that, during a visit to the Greek city of Thebes, Aristoxenus used an aulós (a typical double flute) to heal a man who had gone mad from the thunderous sound of a trumpet with a melody.

greek aulos instrument
Painting by Alma-Tadema (1868) depicting the ancient Greek instrument the aulos. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Such anecdotes, along with the fact that he was a contemporary of figures like those previously mentioned (plus the geographer Dicaearchus of Messene, a Peripatetic whose maps and descriptions greatly assisted Alexander the Great, also of the era), are all we can add to Aristoxenus’ biography because nothing is known of him after Aristotle’s death. Thus, he remained in memory through his works, which totaled four hundred fifty-three books on philosophy, history, ethics, music, and morality.

Content-wise, his works followed the Aristotelian style. Unfortunately, only the three books of the cited Elementa harmonica (Harmonic Elements) survive, and only partially, through citations by Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Vitruvius, Cicero, and Athenaeus of Naucratis, among others. As noted, it is the oldest known treatise on music; it is, therefore, logical that in antiquity he was considered the foremost authority on the subject, to the extent that he was given the nickname “the Musician.” His expressed idea was that the human body and soul harmonize with each other in the same way the parts of a musical instrument do.

The key word is harmony, the balance of proportions between the parts of a whole, which for the Pythagoreans was exclusively numerical; they argued that a mathematical correspondence must be found before a system could be called harmonious. However, despite professing this philosophy and based on his empirical experience, Aristoxenus disagreed, considering auditory experience more important. Thus, he argued that it wasn’t Arithmetic that should be used to calculate the intervals (distance between two notes) in a scale but rather the ear, breaking with the musical theory of the time.

Pythagoras
The monochord was an instrument used by Pythagoras to investigate the equivalence between numbers, weights and sounds. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

What does this mean? Let’s look at a practical example. In the diatonic tetrachord (a tetrachord is an ordered group of four sequential notes that usually generates three internal intervals, e.g., do-re-mi-fa), he observed that the human ear perceives certain intervals approximately, not necessarily precisely. Therefore, he argued that an interval should be perceived as a half tone (or semitone), regardless of the exact mathematical difference between the notes.

It should be clarified that the philosopher distinguished between six types of tetrachords—two diatonic, three chromatic, and one enharmonic—where the distance between notes progressively varied, from common intervals in the diatonic to larger gaps in the enharmonic. In sum, in his own words, by the ear, we judge the magnitude of an interval, and by understanding, we consider its various powers.

Likewise, he claimed that the nature of the melody is best discovered through the perception of the senses and retained through memory (…) because just as it is not necessary for someone writing a iambic verse to pay attention to the arithmetic proportions of the feet that compose it, it is also not necessary for someone writing a Phrygian song to pay attention to the proportions of the sounds characteristic of it (another clarification: iambic refers to a type of verse). He added that the magnitude of an interval is best judged by its resonance, concluding that each author tuned the harmony in their own way, making it impossible to agree with everyone.

Aristoxenus
Fragment of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus with text from Aristoxenus’ treatise Rythmica Stoicheia. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Let us add that, despite everything, Aristoxenus used mathematical terminology to define the varieties of semitones and diesis (each of the three tones the Greeks inserted in the interval of a major tone). In fact, in his first book of Elementa harmonica, he uses it to explain the genera (classes of intonation of the two movable notes of a tetrachord, which are diatonic, enharmonic, and chromatic) of the tetrachords, as well as the species of the octave (a specific sequence of intervals within an octave: whole tone, minor third, and ditone, with the quarter tones and semitones completing the tetrachord).

In the second book, he divides music into seven parts: genera, intervals, sounds, systems, modes (scales, of which he enumerated seven: Lydian, Phrygian, Dorian, Hypolydian, Hypophrygian, Locrian, and Mixolydian), mutations, and melopoeia (harmony). In the third, he describes twenty-eight laws of melodic succession that illustrate to modern scholars the structure of classical Greek music. In summary, Aristoxenus’ work is the first known on musical notation in Classical Greece (there is hardly any data from before the 3rd century BC, and the visual arts never show musicians reading scrolls or tablets, a clear sign that they played by ear or improvised).

Therefore, it was one of the foundations of music theory that would be developed over the following centuries. Partly thanks to Archestratus, a 3rd-century BC Peripatetic theorist (who should not be confused with the homonymous Sicilian poet) who developed and spread his ideas about the sensory perception of music because he agreed with them, and Ptolemaida of Cyrene, another theorist of the same era who, despite being Pythagorean, shows no antipathy toward Aristoxenus and records the methodological debate he had with the followers of that philosophy regarding the musical question.

And a curiosity as an epilogue: Diogenes Laertius, 3rd-century AD Greek historian and doxographer, records a lost testimony from Parmenides according to which Aristoxenus was the first to realize that the planet Venus is the same astronomical body that appears in the morning before the Sun (the famous morning star) and in the evening after sunset; until then, it was thought to be two different bodies, one morning (Phosphorus) and one evening (Hesperus).

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on November 22, 2024: Aristógenes de Tarento, el filósofo autor del tratado sobre música más antiguo conocido, que curaba tocando la flauta

SOURCES

Jacques Brunschwig y Geoffrey Lloyd, El saber griego

Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, Historia de la estética. La estética antigua

Enrico Fubini, Estética de la música

Andrew Barker, Greek musical writings. The musician and his art

Carl A. Huffman, Aristoxenus of Tarentum. Discussion

Sophie Gibson, Aristoxenus of Tarentum and the birth of musicology

J. Javier Goldáraz Gaínza, Aristógenes en la teoría musical del Renacimiento: fundamentos de la ciencia armónica y medición de intervalos

Wikipedia, Aristóxeno

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