[401d]
and so from earliest
childhood insensibly guide them to likeness, to friendship, to harmony with
beautiful reason.” “Yes,” he said,
“that would be far the best education for them.”
“And is it not for this reason, Glaucon,” said I,
“that education in music is most sovereign,1 because
more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul
and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace, if
one is rightly trained,
1 Schopenhauer, following Plato, adds the further metaphysical reason that while the other arts imitate the external manifestations of the universal Will, music represents the Will itself.
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.