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398C - 399E We have now to treat of lyric poetry. Song involves three factors, viz. words, a certain musical mode, and a certain movement or time. Our regulations about words when unaccompanied by music apply equally to words when sung, and the musical mode and time must conform to the words. Now we proscribed all lamentation in our city, so that we must exclude the lugubrious modes; and those which are relaxing in their effects must be rejected on similar grounds. In short, we shall retain two modes and no more, one to imitate the brave man's utterances in times of stress and strain, the other to imitate his accents in seasons of peace and calm. We shall deal similarly with instruments of music, forbidding all those which lend themselves to a variety of modes. It is thus that we purge our ‘luxurious city.’ τὸ περὶ ᾠδῆς κτλ. The discussion has hitherto confined itself chiefly to tragedy and comedy. It remains to discuss lyrical poetry also on its formal side. Now the chief formal characteristic of lyric poetry is its invariable association with music. It is therefore necessary to lay down canons for musical composition. This is the justification for the sections on ‘harmony’ and rhythm, which are wrongly pronounced to be irrelevant by Krohn (Pl. St. p. 15). The present section, and its ancient commentators (Arist. Pol. Θ 7. 1342^{a} 28— 1342^{b} 34, Plut. de Mus. cc. 15—17, Aristid. Quint. I pp. 21, 22 ed. Meibom), have been fully discussed by Westphal (Gr. Harmonik pp. 187-234). Westphal's views have been combatted by C. von Jan (see especially his article Die Tonarten bei Platon in dritten Buche der Republik in Fl. Jahrb. 1867 pp. 815 ff. and 1883, pp. 1354—1362 and 1568—1579), and more recently (in other respects) by Monro in his ‘Modes of ancient Greek Music.’ The last edition of the Harmonik (1886) contains Westphal's reply to von Jan's criticism (pp. 209—215). See also von Jan in Baumeister's Denkmäler d. Kl. Alt. pp. 976 ff., Susemihl and Hicks The Politics of Aristotle Vol. I pp. 595 ff. and 624—631, and H. S. Jones and Monro in the Cl. Rev. VIII pp. 448—454 and IX pp. 79—81. The writers in Meibom's Antiquae Musicae auctores septem have now been re-edited—Aristoxenus by Marquard (Berlin 1868), Aristides Quintilianus by A. Jahn (Berlin 1882), Alypius and others by von Jan in his Musici Scriptores Graeci (Lipsiae 1895), where also the passages of Aristotle bearing on the subject are carefully collected, together with all the extant remains of Greek Music. The account of Die Musik der Griechen by Gleditsch in Iwan Müller's Handbuch will be found a useful and compendious introduction to the study of this part of the Republic. Von Kralik's recent monograph Altgriechische Musik (Stuttgart und Wien) is interesting, but too slight to be of much service. Taken by itself, the language of Plato in this chapter seems to me to point to the existence of four leading or simple modes, viz. Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Ionian (the last two having each two varieties, a σύντονος and a χαλαρά), and one composite mode, the Mixolydian. See App. II. τρόπου. Hartman suggests τρόπον, in view of τὸ περὶ ῥυθμούς 399 E; but cf. 392 C. τρόπος is not here used in its technical sense, for which see Monro l. c. p. 63. συμφωνήσειν. The metaphor may be suggested by the subject under discussion: cf. Phaed. 92 C.
The Republic of Plato. James Adam. 1902. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
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