Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Who is ignorant of the fact that music, of which I will speak first, was in ancient times the object not merely of intense study but of veneration: in fact Orpheus and Linus, to mention no others, were regarded as uniting the roles of musician, poet and philosopher. Both were of divine origin, while the former, because by the marvel of his music he soothed the savage breast, is recorded to have drawn after him not merely beasts of the wild, but rocks and trees.

So too Timagenes asserts that music is the oldest of the arts related to literature, a statement which is confirmed by the testimony of the greatest of poets in whose songs we read that the praise of heroes and of gods were sung to the music of the lyre at the feasts of kings. Does not lopas, the Vergilian bard, sing

  1. The wandering moon and labours of the Sun
Aen. i. 742.
and the like? whereby the supreme poet manifests most clearly that music is united with the knowledge even of things divine.

If this be admitted, music will be a necessity even for an orator, since those fields of knowledge, which were annexed by philosophy on their abandonment by oratory, once were ours and without the knowledge of all such things there can be no perfect eloquence.

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?