Institutio Oratoria
Quintilian
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.
Such was the attention which he paid to this point even in the midst of his most turbulent speeches, when he was terrifying the patrician party and even when he had begun to fear their power. I should like for the benefit of the uninstructed, those
creatures of the heavier Muse,as the saying is, to remove all doubts as to the value of music.
They will at any rate admit that the poets should be read by our future orator. But can they be read without some knowledge of music? Or if any of my critics be so blind as to have some doubts about other forms of poetry, can the lyric poets at any rate be read without such knowledge? If there were anything novel in my insistence on the study of music, I should have to treat the matter at greater length.
But in view of the fact that the study of music has, from those remote times when Chiron taught Achilles down to our own day, continued to be studied by all except those who have a hatred for any regular course of study, it
It will, however, I think be sufficiently clear from the examples I have already quoted, what I regard as the value and the sphere of music in the training of an orator. Still I think I ought to be more emphatic than I have been in stating that the music which I desire to see taught is not our modern music, which has been emasculated by the lascivious melodies of our effeminate stage and has to no small extent destroyed such manly vigour as we still possessed. No, I refer to the music of old which was employed to sing the praises of brave men and was sung by the brave themselves. I will have none of your psalteries and viols, that are unfit even for the use of a modest girl. Give me the knowledge of the principles of music, which have power to excite or assuage the emotions of mankind.
We are told that Pythagoras on one occasion, when some young men were led astray by their passions to commit an outrage on a respectable family, calmed them by ordering the piper to change her strain to a spondaic measure, while Chrysippus selects a special tune to be used by nurses to entice their little charges to sleep.