Plato, Aristotle and the phytagorean influence on Plutarch's De Musica

• Main Author: Roosevelt Rocha
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos (SBEC) 2012-07-01
• Series: Classica, Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos
• Subjects: Plutarco; Platão; Aristóteles; Pitagorismo; Teoria Harmônica
• Online Access: https://revista.classica.org.br/classica/article/view/84

In his treatise On Music, Plutarch cites and discusses excerpts from works of Plato and Aristotle in which these authors deal with issues relevant to the harmonic theory. In these passages, we see that the sources used by Plutarch have a strong influence of the Pythagorean school, under which the study of musical scales was developed focusing on the mathematical relationships that exist between the notes and intervals. This indicates that Plutarch or not directly read the texts of Plato and Aristotle, or read, but using some other source, a commentator of Pythagorean extraction, who we can not identify.