[12]
There can in any case be no doubt that some of
those men whose wisdom is a household word have
been earnest students of music: Pythagoras for
instance and his followers popularised the belief,
which they no doubt had received from earlier
teachers, that the universe is constructed on the
same principles which were afterwards imitated in
[p. 167]
the construction of the lyre, and not content merely
with emphasising that concord of discordant elements
which they style harmony attributed a sound to the
motions of the celestial bodies.1
1 The music of the spheres: cp. the vision of Er in Plato (Rcp. 10) and the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero. The sounds produced by the heavenly bodies correspond to the notes of the heptachord.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
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