The musicality of Plato

A passage in the eighth book of Plato's "Republic" has been described as "notoriously the most difficult in his writings". This article offers a commentary on the passage, in the light of recent musicological and other related research and its insights into the ways in which Plato's political and moral thought is underpinned by the ancient science of harmonics. It argues that whilst the Greek is difficult and the proportional arithmetic unfamiliar, the central problem in understanding this text is that modern scholars have forgotten the conventions of Pythagorean mathematics and their intrinsic relationship to music. (Author abstract)