[400a]
require the foot and the air to
conform to that kind of man's speech and not the speech to the foot and the
tune. What those rhythms would be, it is for you to tell us as you did the
musical modes.” “Nay, in faith,” he said,
“I cannot tell. For that there are some three forms1 from which the feet are combined,
just as there are four2 in the notes
of the voice whence come all harmonies, is a thing that I have observed and
could tell. But which are imitations of which sort of life, I am unable to
say.3”
1 According to the ancient musicians these are the equal as e.g. in dactyls (), spondees () and anapests (), where the foot divides into two equal quantities; the 3/2 ratio, as in the so-called cretic (); the 2/1 as in the iamb () and trochee (). Cf. Aristid. Quint. i. pp. 34-35.
2 Possibly the four notes of the tetrachord, but there is no agreement among experts. Cf. Monro, Modes of Ancient Greek Music.
3 Modern psychologists are still debating the question.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.