With sacred hymns and songs that sweetly please,These verses, most excellent master, I thought requisite to add as the finishing stone to my musical discourse, which were by you cited before1 to show the force of harmony. For indeed the chiefest and sublimest end of music is the graceful return of our thanks to the Gods, and the next is to purify and bring our minds to a sober and harmonious temper. Thus, said Soterichus, most excellent master, I have given you what may be called an encyclic discourse of music.
The Grecian youth all day the Gods appease.
Their lofty paeans bright Apollo hears,
And still the charming sounds delight his ears.
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Now that those cities which were governed by the
best laws took care always of a generous education in
music, many testimonies may be produced. But for us it
shall suffice to have instanced Terpander, who appeased a
sedition among the Lacedaemonians, and Thaletas the Cretan, of whom Pratinas writes that, being sent for by the
Lacedaemonians by advice of the oracle, he freed the city
from a raging pestilence. Homer tells that the Grecians
stopped the fury of another noisome pestilence by the
power and charms of the same noble science:—
1 See Section 2.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 1.
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