Musical Mimesis and Political Ethos in Plato’s Republic

Poetic Mimesis

Scholars who study mimesis in Plato generally agree on the significance of the following narrative: First, in Book 2 of the Republic, Socrates advances a critique of poetry that focuses on its content: the poets are here accused of creating false stories (muthoi) about the gods that set bad examples for the young who cannot yet distinguish between truths and falsehoods (377e-392c). In Book 3, the focus shifts from the content of poetry to its form or style (lexis): these stories are told through straight narration (diegesis), mimesis, or some combination of the two (392d; 394c). Socrates here isolates the mimetic component of poetry as its deceptive part: when Homer narrates in his own voice in the Illiad he does not hide himself whereas when he speaks “as if he were” Chryses, begging Agamemnon to release his daughter, he engages in a kind of deceptive impersonation (392d-394c). Finally, in Book 10, the distinction between impersonation (mimesis) and straight narration (diegesis) collapses: here all poetic discourse is characterized as mimetic, where mimesis now denotes a kind of image-making comparable with painting. The painter is like someone holding up a mirror (596d-e); he produces mere reflections of objects in the sensible world, objects which are less real than the Forms, which are true reality. The tragic poet is just this sort of artist: he paints verbal images of people, events, and things that are also a third removed from the truth (597e; 600e-601a); the poet has “no worthwhile knowledge of the things he imitates” (602b-c) precisely because he appeals to our “desires, pleasures and pains” (607d). Poetic mimesis thus corrupts the soul. It uses “trickery” rather than truth and appeals to the base appetites and passions rather than rationality (602c-608b). The poets are thus banned from the city in speech with the famous claim that there is an “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry (607b).

There are significant and extensive controversies regarding what in fact Plato is saying about mimesis in Books 2, 3, and 10, as well as how these relate to one another and whether they are ultimately compatible. ⁵ These controversies fall outside my immediate concerns, but I do want to underscore three interrelated points of scholarly consensus germane to the topic at hand. First, scholars of mimesis in the Republic all look primarily to the three sections outlined in the brief exposition above in order to articulate, on the one hand, what they think Plato meant by mimesis and, on the other, the compatibilities or incompatibilities between the different senses of the term which he elucidates. Second, the terms of the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, as articulated by these scholars, depend upon the intervening tripartite division of the soul (in Book 4) and theory of the Forms (in Books 5 and 6). Accordingly, mimetic poetry is banned from the ideal city in speech by some scholars on psychological grounds (it appeals to the destabilizing appetitive and desiring lower parts of the soul and thus subverts reason), ⁶ and epistemological grounds (poets are regarded as possessing and conveying knowledge when in fact they only produce pleasurable images of images) ⁷ or because it works through imaginative identification, which is considered dangerous by Plato. ⁸

These interpretations of the quarrel all depend on a general understanding of poetic mimesis as a primarily logocentric activity, where logos is understood in its narrow sense as speech, or reasoned account. Socrates certainly identifies language as the poet’s imitative tool: on the one hand, the poet engages in mimesis when he speaks in the voice of another, and on the other, he creates mimetic images painted in speech. Whether through impersonation, or representation, or both, the poet uses language mimetically; this activity is particularly dangerous precisely because of the psychological, epistemological, and metaphysical deceptions made possible through “falsehoods in words” (382b-d). ⁹ Of course, one significant problem with focusing on a logocentric mimesis as the point of distinction between philosophy and poetry is that Platonic philosophy, presented in dialogue form, is itself mimetic. It is thus not mimesis per se, but the mimetic relationship of language to reality that appears to be at stake in the quarrel. In order to recuperate mimesis in the service of Platonic philosophy, certain scholars thus draw a distinction between good and bad mimesis, where good mimesis is understood as the philosophical imitation of the Forms, and where the Platonic dialogues and the myths created therein are the only type of poetic representation accepted by Plato. ¹⁰

I argue, however, that there is a non-logocentric characterization of poetic mimesis in Book 3 of the Republic, having to do with musical composition and modes, widely overlooked in the scholarship. ¹¹ Socrates here defers to Damon, the renowned fifth-century BCE music theorist, who showed that song is the mimesis of characters and modes of conduct: courage, cowardliness, moderation, frenzy, etc. (398c-400b). The interlocutors identify the three component parts of song—words, harmony, and rhythm (398d)—and explicitly claim that the poet engages in mimesis through rhythm and harmony (399a-c). Unlike Book 3’s first notion of mimesis through impersonation, this secondary sense of mimesis does not have to do with speech: here, the poet engages in mimesis through the musical and nonlinguistic aspects of his activity. In turn, Book 10 makes almost no mention of this nonlinguistic musical mimesis when banning the poets from the city in speech. And why should it? Musical mimesis does not raise a problem for the interlocutors in Book 10 who are concerned with banning all forms of poetic speech, and, in fact, “strip the poet’s words of their musical colorings (mousikes khromaton)” (601b) prior to banishing them. Nothing is said about musical mimesis here, I argue, precisely because music does not quarrel with philosophy over logos (speech, reasoned account). Music thus seems to fall outside of the conceptual parameters delimited by the dominant contemporary mimesis scholarship.

I thus want to move away from the notions of Platonic aesthetics circumscribed by the old quarrel; the quarrel is, in any event, introduced as poetry (poiesis) and not music (mousike) at the outset of Book 10 (595a-b). ¹² Instead, I want to revisit the aesthetic question in the Republic at the point where most contemporary mimesis scholars leave off, namely, the moment in Book 3 when Socrates and Glaucon agree that they have likely completed their discussion of “the part of mousike that concerns speech (logos) and stories [having] spoken both of what is to be said and how it is to be said” and that it remains “to discuss lyric odes and songs” (398b-c). Mousike is here explicitly broken down into its two component parts, marking the brief, but important, transition from a notion of mimesis concerned primarily with poetry and other so-called imagistic arts, to one concerned with music strictly speaking.

Musical Mimesis

The notion of musical mimesis arises in the Republic in the context of delimiting an upbringing for the future guardians of the city in speech in which they will be exposed to music from a young age in order to acquire, through habituation, the correct aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual habits. The ultimate aim of the musical education is to inculcate the conditions for sound judgment; musical education is “most sovereign (kuriotate)” in this respect, Socrates here claims, because of music’s unique capacity to shape the soul:

First, because rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else, affecting it most strongly and bringing it grace, so that if someone is properly educated in mousike, it makes him graceful, but if not, then the opposite. Second, because anyone who has been properly educated in mousike will sense it acutely when something has been omitted from a thing and when it hasn’t been finely crafted or finely made by nature. And since he has the right distastes, he’ll praise fine things, be pleased by them, receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine and good. He’ll rightly object to what is shameful, hating it while he is still young, and unable to grasp the reason, but, having been educated this way, he will welcome the reason when it comes and recognize it easily because of its kinship with himself. (401d-402a)

This passage provides an indication of how musical education takes place: music assimilates itself to the soul as a kind of extra-rational perception or recognition that, in turn, prepares the soul for reasoned judgment; music prepares the soul to recognize its kinship to reason and its affinity to the virtues. The general claim thus seems to be that education in music is most sovereign because, in a fundamental sense, music both precedes and is a precondition to logos (reasoned speech, account). It is worth noting that Socrates will provisionally conclude the discussion of musical mimesis in Book 3 by imagining a scenario in which music is omitted from a person’s upbringing, making explicit music’s particular provenance over the soul. Socrates envisages someone who “never touches mousike or philosophy” and “never associates with the Muse” (411c-d). Whatever “love of learning” this person might have had would soon become “enfeebled, deaf, and blind, because he never tastes any learning or investigation or partakes of any discussion or any of the rest of mousike, to nurture or arouse it” (411d). This person becomes a hater of reasoned argument (misologos) and is completely a-musical (amousos). Devoid of rhythm or grace “or any of the rest of mousike,” persuasion is lost on him; ignorant and stupid as he is, he lives his life like a wild animal, by “force and savagery” (411e).

In order to determine the music suitable to the paideutic task at hand, the interlocutors turn first to the seemingly more technical questions of musical modes, or harmoniai, and then to musical meter, or rhythm. ¹³ The criterion upon which the modes and rhythms are evaluated are explicitly mimetic and ethical: which sort is an imitation of which sort of life (400a). Socrates asks Glaucon, in his capacity as mousikos (398e), to delineate the modes that express various moral habits so that they might determine the music to be accepted or rejected in the city in speech. The context in which the term mousikos is used here suggests that Glaucon is an expert on technical questions having to do with music in its strict sense; one who knows about the harmonic and rhythmic elements of musical structures, compositions, and instrumentation. ¹⁴ Socrates, who admits to knowing little about the more technical aspects of music proper (399a) nonetheless delimits the ethical qualities by which the modes should be judged: “drunkenness, softness and idleness” are inappropriate character traits for the guardians (398e). Glaucon, in turn, identifies the modes that imitate these “lamenting” and “relaxed” moral habits—namely, the Lydian and Ionian—that must therefore be excluded from the city in speech (398d-399a). Once Socrates and Glaucon have determined that the ethical content of the two remaining modes—namely, the “moderate and courageous” Dorian and Phrygian—render them essential to the upbringing of the guardians, they turn their attention to rhythms. Here, however, their collective musical knowledge is insufficient and they turn to a musical expert, namely, the musical theorist Damon of Oa.

I want to note two aspects of this conversation. First, the certainty with which Socrates and Glaucon proceed to identify the modes according to precise ethical content suggests a familiarity with the topic; ancient Greeks generally believed that the harmoniai expressed the dominant ethical character of the tribes of their presumed origin or the regions in which they remained prevalent. ¹⁵ Plato’s original readership would have thus taken it for granted that music formed an integral part of any system of education precisely because of music’s intimate connection to the greater cultural ethos. Second, the mention of Damon in this regard is significant. Damon, I argue, not only stands behind much of Plato’s philosophical treatment of musical mimesis but also underscores its political implications. ¹⁶ In both the tone of these passages and in the appeal to Damon, Plato is injecting himself into the debates that arose in the late fifth century as a result of the so-called New Music revolution.

The “New Music” Revolution and Damon of Oa

The New Music was a movement that rejected traditional music and musical practices at Athens; its musicians altered the typical structures of songs and musical compositions, modified instruments, incorporated various types of rhythms and meters, and added “theatrical” aspects to musical performances. ¹⁷ The dithyrambic poets and kitharodos were the first to experiment with new musical techniques in the popular musical contests: dithyrambs were lyric songs written by famous poets, but performed by choruses accompanied by the music of the aulos (a kind of windpipe), whereas kitharodia were solo-concert performances wherein the poet-singer accompanied himself on the kithara (a stringed instrument similar to the lyre). ¹⁸ The musical competitions rewarded originality and innovation in musical techniques and styles, and subsequently, helped give rise to the professionalization of the musician. The audience, made up of regular citizens, acted as judges in these contests; critics of the New Musicians thus accused them of basing their musical compositions on what would please the audience rather than according to musical standards of “right and wrong.” The localized anxiety that accompanied the New Music revolution, however, far exceeded the considerations of the musical contest. Rather, and as the comedic poets make manifestly clear, the New Music in fact challenged deeply held ancient convictions regarding politics, justice, and ethics.

In Pherecretes’s comedy Chiron, a disheveled, personified Music complains to the character Justice of the increasingly outrageous (and violently sexual) treatment she has suffered recently from the citharodes and dithyrambic poets. ¹⁹ Music claims that the poet Melanippides was the first to misuse her and accuses him of setting music on its degenerate path towards over-elaboration and complexity. Music is here referring to the professionalization of the musician brought about in part by Melanippides’s innovations on the aulos, the consequences of which have done her irreparable damage. Up until the New Music revolution, aulos-players were wholly subordinate to the poets; insofar as it is impossible to simultaneously sing and play a wind instrument, aulos-players could only accompany the poet’s words. The poet thus hired and paid for the musician, who received little or no recognition for any musical talent independent of the poet. Under the New Music, however, aulos-playing became an intricate musical art independent of poetry, and the musician, in turn, became valued for his skill and showmanship. ²⁰ By the late fifth century, the independent contribution of the aulos-player to the musical competitions was significant enough that the polis assumed their cost and placed them under a regulatory institution. ²¹ In the professionalization of the aulos-player, instrumental music thus managed to emancipate itself from poetry. In turn, a significant consequence of this emancipation would be to render the poets’ words subordinate to music. ²²

Music also names the dithyrambic poet Timotheus of Miletus whose maltreatment of her, she tells Justice, goes beyond all the others she has mentioned: “if he met me somewhere walking alone without words or dance, he stripped me and undid me with his dozen strings.” ²³ Music is here referring to Timotheus’s replacement of the hallowed seven-stringed kithara of Terpander in favor of the twelve-stringed instrument he innovated; a reference that is in fact an appeal to the fundamental Greek belief in the intimate connection between music and political order, and that to do violence to one is to do violence to the other. To explain: There is a widely reported story in the ancient sources that Spartan officials forbade Timotheus from appearing there precisely because of his musical innovation on the kithara. ²⁴ Although we usually think of Sparta as primarily a military culture, it was also the first great center of music in Greece; the very constitution of Spartan society was conceived of in musical terms and music was intimately connected with the Spartan civic ethos.

In Spartan tradition, music, in fact, preceded the law: Lycurgus, the legendary lawgiver of Sparta responsible for its founding constitution, brought his laws from Crete only after he had already sent ahead the lyric poet Thales, whose songs had in them the qualities of order (kosmos) and establishment (katastasis). ²⁵ When Sparta was in a state of civil unrest in the first half of the seventh century, an oracle recommended sending for another lyric poet, Terpander from Lesbos, who was famous for having invented the kitharodic nomoi, solo songs in which the performer accompanied himself on the lyre. Terpander now used these songs to restore public order at Sparta. Spartan tradition thus identified the effects of the lyric poet as similar to those of the most powerful lawgiver (nomothete); music has the same intrinsic properties as law, namely, the capacity for order, establishment, and restoration. ²⁶ In this context, Timotheus’s technical modifications of the kithara were much more than innovative alterations to that instrument’s structure. Instead, any change in the existing musical structure at Sparta would alter the existing political order; among other things, it would change the ethos of the law upon which the polis was established, and its restored order depended.

The connection between music, law, and political order thus in some sense originates at Sparta, in Terpander’s invention and use of the oldest type of kitharodic nomoi. ²⁷ The ancients attributed the dual meaning of nomos as song and law to this tradition precisely because the very rhythmic patterns used to establish the rule of law were themselves called nomes; these nomes, in turn, were protected against innovation by the same legal order they helped establish. ²⁸ Plato, in the Laws, makes reference to this tradition when he has the Athenian Stranger claim, “the strange fact should be accepted that our songs have become laws (nomoi) just as in ancient times, people gave this name to songs sung to the cithara” (Laws 799e). The Republic also builds on this tradition, but here, Plato has Socrates credit Damon for making the connection between music and political order explicit: “As Damon says, and I am convinced, the musical modes are never changed without change in the most important laws of the city” (Republic 424c). This reference to Damon has particular historical salience in the context of the general musico-political concerns of fifth-century Athens.

Damon was a music theorist, great friend of Socrates and, according to Isocrates, widely “reputed in his day to be the most sagacious (phronimos) among the Athenians.” ²⁹ He is best known for studying the effects of different types of music on behavior and character, from which he developed an ethos theory of music, identifying the intrinsic ethical properties of specific rhythms and harmonies. The overview of the passages in the Republic where Socrates and Glaucon are concerned with determining which modes and rhythms are to be part of the education of the guardians I provided above, and to which I return below, are based on this notion of musical ethos.

It is less well known that Damon was also a political advisor to Pericles. ³⁰ As Alcibiades remarks in the Platonic dialogue named after him, Pericles became proficient in the art of politics by seeking the counsel of experts, and “even now, despite his advancing age, he consults with Damon for the same purposes” (Alcibiades 118c). Some of Damon’s political influence was certainly tied to his philosophical treatment of music: Plutarch notes that it was after studying music’s effects on behavior under Damon’s tutelage that Pericles constructed the Odeion music hall, reorganized the musical component of the Panathenaic festivals, and selected musicians himself for the dithyrambic competitions. ³¹ Yet when Olympiodorus writes of the songs “which Pericles learned from Damon [and] through which he harmonized the city,” ³² the implications are more than simply, or strictly, musical: the Aristotelian Athenaion politeia reports that it was on his insistence to “give people their own”—the slogan coined by Damon calling for the redistribution of Athenian imperial income to the masses—that Pericles instituted payment for jury duty, a milestone in the growth of fifth-century democracy. ³³

Importantly, there is also sufficient extant evidence to suggest that Damon himself treated music as a political phenomenon, or more precisely, that his philosophical treatment of music was oriented towards practical political concerns. He is purported to have written a speech to the Areopagus Council, the political body filled with retired state officials who enjoyed little real power but were vested with certain high judicial functions, and with the responsibility of supervising public morality in general. In this speech, Damon appealed to the Council to exercise its influence in regulating musical practices and education at Athens on the premise that musical modes are intimately connected with the ethical disposition of the soul. ³⁴ It is unclear whether Damon delivered the speech, or whether he wrote the speech with the intention that it be made public simply as a philosophical critique. For the present purpose, the value of the speech lies in its historical depiction of the politically weighted concerns of fifth-century musical practices at Athens. The New Musicians wanted to liberate music from its conventional technical and social constraints, but they left the more profound ethical and political implications of their innovations to be explored by their proponents and critics alike. For Damon—and indeed for Plato—the New Music compromised the foundational jurisprudential tenet essential to Athenian civic virtue, namely, an understanding of the law (nomos) as necessarily instantiating a musical ethos.

By way of returning to the discussion of musical mimesis in the Republic, I want to underscore that Plato’s philosophical treatment of music builds on this very tradition in two ways. First, the dual meaning of nomos handed down from Sparta is at stake in Socrates’s insistence that the guardians must, above all else, preserve the system of education and upbringing of the city in speech: they must “guard as carefully as they can against any innovation in mousike or physical training that is counter to the established order” (424b). Second, Damon’s theory of musical ethos is behind Socrates’s ensuing claim that the best mode of defense available to the guardians is to build “their bulwark in music” (424c); not only are the guardians themselves to receive a musical education, but in turn, music is the means by which they are to preserve the system of education upon which the harmony of the city depends. The mechanism by which the guardians are to be educated and in turn preserve the unity of the polis is made possible through a mimesis that is distinctly and uniquely musical; only musical mimesis incorporates the juridical and ethical traditions I have just discussed.

Musical Mimesis: Assimilation and Reciprocity

I referred earlier to the scenario Socrates envisages in which music is omitted from a person’s upbringing; Socrates likens the a-musical person to an ignorant, stupid, savage animal who prefers force to reasoned speech (411d-e). This a-musical person stands in contrast with the person who “achieves the finest blend of music and physical training and impresses it on his soul in the most measured way”; this is the one “we’d most correctly call completely harmonious and musical (mousikos) more than the one who brings the strings of an instrument into unison with one another” (412a). Socrates’s invitation to see a true musician in the one who harmonizes the parts of the soul is not metaphorical. Rather, I argue that it builds meaningfully on Damon’s ethos theory of music and helps establish the important notion that music is somehow within the soul. The ancient commentators are instructive on this notion.

Aristides Quintilanius argues that the essential foundational tenet of Damon’s ethos theory of music has to do with a notion of similarity or assimilation (homoioo, homoiotes). He writes, “The harmoniai . . . resemble either the intervals which are commonest in them, or the notes that bound them: and the notes in turn resemble the movements and emotions of the soul. The fact that it is through assimilation (homoiotes) that the notes both instill a character (ethos) previously absent, in children and in older people too, and draw out the character that lay hidden within, was demonstrated by the followers of Damon.” ³⁵ Homoiotes signifies not simply assimilation but similarity and likeness: the suggestion here is thus that music can instill from without an ethos previously absent, and it can bring out a latent ethos from within, because of its similarity to the structure and movement of the soul itself. In Athenaeus, this same notion of similarity/assimilation seems to inform what he identifies as the mutually constitutive nature of music and ethos in Damonian thought: “It is well said by the school of Damon the Athenian that songs and dances are the inevitable result of a certain kind of motion in the soul: those souls that are beautiful and characteristic of free men create songs and dance of the same kind, while the opposite sort create the opposite.” ³⁶ On the one hand, the music a soul will create and find pleasurable determines its character (ethos) and, on the other, a person’s character—his “motion within”—determines what music that soul will create and enjoy.

I thus want to recuperate from Damon, via Aristides and Athenaeus, the importance of a specifically musical notion of homoiotes: ethical assimilation is possible in music because music and soul are similar in both structure and movement. ³⁷ Plato’s musical mimesis builds on these notions in three specific, and intertwined, ways.

First, Socrates at the end of Book 4 explicitly likens the structure of the just soul with a musical structure: the just person “tunes the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical scale—high, low and middle” (443d). He harmonizes “those parts and any others there may be in between,” producing a self-controlled and beautifully ordered, unity (443d-e). All just and fine actions have to do with “preserving and achieving this inner harmony” (443e). Socrates is here claiming, on the one hand, that the soul has a musical structure and, on the other, that the soul’s ability to produce its own harmony is neither given nor fixed by its musical constitution. Instead, the soul requires active tuning in order to achieve harmony and maintain its unity. This tuning is the activity of Socrates’s “true musician” (412a), and is the very movement within the soul to which Aristides and Athenaues refer. Socrates is here describing a just soul, whose character is constituted in the continual act of harmonizing the parts of the soul into their unified virtue.

Second, for Plato, the notion of assimilation (homoiotes) is particularly important in consideration of a musical mimesis that also involves words; a mimesis that has to do with music in its more comprehensive sense. ³⁸ I noted earlier that with the professionalization of the musician, instrumental music freed itself from poetry; an attendant consequence was to render the poets’ words subordinate to music. The Republic is highly critical of this practice. Concluding the discussion of musical modes in Book 3, Socrates and Glaucon insist that

rhythm and mode must conform to the words and not vice versa; good rhythm follows fine words by assimilation, while bad rhythms follow the opposite kinds of words, and the same for harmony and disharmony. [In turn,] the style and content of the words conform to the character of the speaker’s soul. (400d)

On the one hand, logos (word, speech) is here given explicit priority over rhythm and mode; “to be sure, these things must conform to the words” (400d). On the other hand, by stripping actual music down to its constitutive origins, Plato indicates that the soul—which we know to be structured musically—is the necessary precondition to the logoi (words, speech) upon which actual music is attendant; although actual music must conform to the words, words necessarily follow from the musical soul. Third, and relatedly, in delimiting the modes required for the city in speech, Socrates suggests that actual music imitates the non-linguistic dimensions of speech: the Dorian and Phrygian modes are a mimesis of the vocal tones and accents of courageous and moderate persons (399a,c). In other words, the nonlinguistic dimensions of speech—the musical sounds—are the audible actualization of the harmonized soul and its attendant ethos.

Platonic musical mimesis can thus be provisionally summed up as follows: in the same way that the harmony of the tripartite soul is a fundamental aspect of virtue itself, so too is musical ordering an aspect of the mimesis of virtue. Music is the product of this particular movement in the soul (the harmonization or tuning) while it simultaneously actualizes the conditions of the soul itself (the tuning occurs within a delimited musical structure). Thus, on the one hand, music is consequent to good ethos or virtue: the harmonious structure of the soul and its attendant ethos are expressed in actual music (mode, rhythm, and song). On the other hand, music is a mimesis of good ethos or virtue: the way in which music expresses virtue corresponds in its audible structure to the structure and movement in the soul of virtue itself. The homoiotes of musical mimesis is thus a kind of correspondence, or a likeness of kind, that is simply not possible of any kind of strictly image-making mimesis, including poetry’s images in speech. This distinction is crucial. Music does not produce mediated representations but rather actualizes the conditions of the soul itself; in musical mimesis we are not making movements that simply correspond, or give voice, to our ethos—we are in fact actively doing something to our souls.

Musical mimesis is thus wholly distinct from other types of mimesis because it is, by virtue of this homoiotes, necessarily an unmediated and reciprocal activity; it isn’t simply that music actualizes the conditions of the soul, but also, that the soul instantiates the conditions of music. Plato’s attention to musical modes in the Republic, thus, has to do with the premise that only in the case of musical mimesis is the order of the soul and the order of the notes of the specific harmonies literally one of mimetic assimilation, rather than one of imitation, mediated via logo-centric images or speech. Importantly, this means that for Plato, true music is about ethos forming and not simply ethos expression. In musical mimesis, we are not simply making audible images that correspond to our dispositions. Instead, we are actively tuning, or forming, the very character of our musical souls.

Recuperating the Modes

I noted previously that Plato is explicitly appealing to convention in the discussion of harmoniai where Socrates and Glaucon identify particular dispositions or ethical characteristics associated with the Ionian, Lydian, Dorian, and Phrygian modes; it was Damon who made these ethos correlations explicit and for which he is best known. ³⁹ Socrates’ characterization of the harmoniai he rejects is an uncontroversial appeal, via Damon, to convention: the Lydian mode is here associated with melancholy, expressive of sorrow and lamentation, and the Ionian with the kind of softness and indolence that accompanies drunkenness (398c). Of the two modes Socrates privileges for the city in speech, his association of the Dorian mode with manliness, courage (andreia), and temperance is also conventional, whereas there is “notorious difficulty” with his similar characterization of the Phrygian mode. ⁴⁰ The passage is as follows:

Just leave me the mode that would suitably imitate the tone and rhythm of a courageous person who is active in battle or doing other forceful deeds, or who is failing and facing wounds, death, or some other misfortune, and who, in all of these circumstances, is fighting off his fate steadily and with self-control. Leave me also another mode, that of someone engaged in a peaceful, unforced, voluntary action, persuading someone or asking a favor of a god in prayer or of a human being through teaching and exhortation, or, on the other hand, submitting to the supplication of another who is teaching him and trying to get him to change his mind, and who, in all of these circumstances, is acting with moderation and self-control, not with arrogance but with understanding, and is content with the outcome. Leave me, then, these two modes, which will best imitate the forced or voluntary tones of voice of those who are moderate and courageous, whether in good fortune or in bad. (399a-c)

I want to note, first, that the city in speech will require two kinds of music: one suited to forced, or involuntary, actions, namely the Dorian mode, and the other to voluntary activity, namely, the Phrygian. ⁴¹ Involuntary actions are so named because they arise in situations of duress, notably, war and other situations of force. Plato is here appealing to convention. The Dorian mode was the most widely used and well-regarded harmonia at Athens; Pindar acclaimed it to be the most dignified, and Heraclides insisted it displayed manliness and courage in its simplicity. ⁴² The Dorian mode was thus precisely the music capable of inculcating the necessary courage required to act in situations of misfortune or force. Voluntary actions, by contrast, arise in times of peace not war, and have to do with persuasion rather than force; they are those situations in which one can act freely but, nonetheless, also require moderation and self-control.

The difficulty for certain commentators arises with the connection Socrates draws between the Phrygian mode and the temperate virtues, when the majority of ancient sources make the Phrygian mode the harmonia of frenzied inspiration, associating it especially with the cult of Dionysus and the music of the aulos. ⁴³ Some of this difficulty is compounded by Plato himself: immediately following these characterizations of the Dorian and Phrygian modes, Socrates and Glaucon turn their attention to instruments, and accept only the lyre and the cithara into the city in speech (399c-d). The aulos is here explicitly banned on the grounds that it has the greatest compass of any instrument and, in fact, is imitated by all other pan-harmonic instruments (399d). Socrates and Glaucon conclude the discussion on modes and instruments in agreement that they “certainly aren’t doing anything new in preferring Apollo and his instruments to Marysas and his” (399e). This reference is meaningful.

The naming of Marsyas and Apollo here is generally understood to refer to a popular legend that gained currency at Athens during the fifth-century underscoring a certain anxiety over the aulos. Marsyas was a mythical shepherd, or satyr, and one of the Phrygian musicians who introduced the aulos and the Phrygian harmonia to Greece. In his Marsyas, the poet Melanippides (whom Music accuses of having done her irreparable damage in Pherecretes’s comedy Chiron, to which I referred earlier) recounts that the aulos was originally invented by Athena, who then threw it away because of the ugly distortions to her face brought about by blowing into the pipes. ⁴⁴ The aulos fell in Phrygia where Marsyas found it, and returned with it to Athens, where he famously challenged Apollo and his lyre to a musical contest, lost, and was hanged and skinned alive. In the Politics, Aristotle claims that although Athena might have cast away the instrument because it made her ugly while playing, “it is more likely that it was because education in aulos-playing has no effect on the intelligence, whereas we attribute knowledge and expertise to Athena.” ⁴⁵ On this understanding, the aulos is an enemy of logos in the most comprehensive sense of the word; playing the aulos prevents the employment of speech and the deployment of reason. The opposition between Marsyas and his aulos on the one hand and Athena, Apollo, and the lyre on the other is thus understood as necessarily also an opposition between the Dorian and Phrygian modes. Aristotle criticizes Socrates’ inclusion of the Phrygian mode in the city in speech on the grounds that it has the same effect as the aulos he bans: both are orgiastic, passionate, and stand in explicit contrast to the steadfast and rational Dorian mode and its instruments. ⁴⁶

Scholars thus generally take one of three interpretive positions regarding Socrates’s permission of the Phrygian mode in the city in speech. The first is to either ignore it, or make note of it, while leaving it unexamined. ⁴⁷ The second is to treat the passage on the modes as indicative of Damon’s view of what is required in musical education, which is only provisionally accepted by Socrates and Glaucon. ⁴⁸ The third view is to treat Socrates’s acceptance of the Phrygian mode in the city in speech as an “insignificant lapse” in his management of the musical order. ⁴⁹ In any case, all three points of view insist, following Aristotle, there is no auloi permitted in the city on which to play Phrygian music.

It is worth noting, however, that Socrates does not ban the aulos from the city in speech because of its passionate and enthusiastic character. Instead, the aulos is rejected in consideration of the technical characteristics of the instrument; it is the “most many-stringed of all” and is in fact imitated by all of the other pan-harmonic instruments (399d). ⁵⁰ In other words, the aulos has the greatest range of all instruments, wind or stringed, which provides that instrument with significant innovative capabilities. Socrates, I argue, is here rejecting from the city in speech the aulos of the New Musicians, the instrument upon which the professional musicians rose to fame in the musical contests by emancipating themselves from the poets. I have already shown that with the professionalization of the musician, instrumental music freed itself from poetry, but that like the poets, the New Musicians also pandered to the pleasure of the audience, thus giving rise to an attendant problem of judgment: as the Athenian Stranger describes them in the Laws, these musicians

unintentionally, in their idiotic way, misrepresented their art, claiming that in music there are no standards of right and wrong at all, but that the most correct criterion is the pleasure of a man who enjoyed the performance, whether he is a good man or not. (700d-e)

I argue that when Socrates in the Republic banishes the “aulos-makers and aulos-players” and their instrument from the city in speech (399d), he is placing a necessary moratorium on these professional musicians in order to make room for the musically educated “amateur.”

I thus want to note that in keeping with his discussion of the aulos, Socrates is similarly silent about the so-called Dionysian components of the Phrygian mode; on the face of it, neither the banishment of the aulos nor the acceptance of the mode have to do with their enthusiastic or passionate characteristics. This does not mean, however, that Socrates mischaracterizes the Phrygian mode when he describes it as a mimesis of moderation or that he is mistaken to include it in the city in speech. Instead, I argue that Socrates is in fact making reference to the origins of Phrygian music and suggesting the mode be used precisely in the manner in which it was understood and employed in practice, in the cult of Dionysos. The Laws provides some needed clarity.

The Athenian Stranger refers to the women who use rhythms and modes to cure “Corybantic conditions” in the soul of babies and children (790d). The Corybantes were the Dionysian revelers who sang and danced themselves into rapturous states not only in order to commune with the gods but also as a cure for manic dispossession. Insofar as the soul of a manic depressive oscillates between great elation and deep terror, and both are extreme states of the soul that dispossess it of order, the Corybantes believed that “vigorous motion” from without, namely music and dance, has an ordering, and so curative, effect on the soul. ⁵¹ In other words, the passionate music of the Corybantes “by canceling out the internal agitations of the soul that give rise to fear and frenzy, induces a feeling of calm and peace in the soul” (791a-b). This is precisely the sort of musical cure used to calm infants and children; when a child is agitated, his mother does not keep him still but

takes care to move him about, rocking him constantly in her arms not silently, but humming a tune. It’s exactly as if they were charming the children with aulos-playing, even as it is done for the maddened Bacchic revelers, to whom they administer this same cure, which consists of the motion that is dance and the music of the Muses. (790e)

This sort of music is a kind of “training in courage,” in that it helps us “overcome the terror and fears that assail us” (791c). When Socrates in the Republic characterizes the Phrygian mode as moderate and self-controlled, he does not mean that it lacks in enthusiasm or passion. Instead, I argue, following the Phrygian tradition Socrates takes for granted that this passionate harmonia brings with it the necessary moderating ethos that is itself also a training in the courage required of situations in which one can act freely.

Aesthetic Concerns and Political Judgment

The discussion of the modes, I now show, not only underscores the mutual embeddedness of aesthetics and politics, but also elucidates the particular way in which the aesthetic question opens onto the question of critical judgment in political communities. That is, Plato’s treatment of musical mimesis in the Republic not only serves to reframe the aesthetic question on its own ground but also in terms of its political implications.

I showed earlier that musical mimesis is distinct from other types of mimesis because of music’s structural correspondence to the soul; music holds the unique possibility of mimetic assimilation rather than simple imitation or representation. When Socrates and Glaucon determine that musical modes, Dorian or Phrygian, are a mimesis of tones of voice, they thus invite the possibility of levels of mimetic differentiation. On the one hand, the modes are an audible imitation of vocal tone, which is itself the audible articulation of a particular disposition. In this limited sense, a musical mode might be subsumed under the notion of mimesis as image- or appearance- making: music as an audible image of a sound. ⁵² On the other hand, the treatment of the Phrygian mode shows that music’s power is derived from its mimetic engagement with the soul, which is differentiated from the vocal tone of which it is also an audible image. The passionate Phrygian mode is, most importantly, also a mimesis of a moderate disposition, or soul. The mimetic correspondence between mode and soul, as I have previously shown, is not imagistic, but a likeness of kind: music actualizes the conditions of the soul because it corresponds in its audible structure to the movement of the soul itself. It turns out that a moderate soul may be the result of passionate tuning, and also, that a passionate cry may be the audible expression of a moderate soul: both are possible because music is constitutive, rather than representational, of ethos.

The practical condition in which the Phrygian mode is manifest serves to elucidate Plato’s political concerns. The Phrygian mode is suited to situations of understanding rather than force; to persuasion, learning, and teaching, rather than fighting; to peace rather than violence; to freedom rather than coercion (399a-c). This characterization of the Phrygian mode can thus be understood as an assessment of the requirements of healthy political judgment in particular political context: situations in which one can act freely are particularly vulnerable to poor judgments. The Republic’s anxiety about democratic culture arises precisely on these grounds: the “the city full of freedom and freedom of speech” (557b) is the one where citizens “take no notice of the laws (nomos), whether written or unwritten, in order to avoid having any master at all” (563d). To be lawless, for Plato, is akin to being a-musical (424c-d); as I show next, the lawfulness engendered by musical mimesis treats of judgment (krinein) and music as co-conditions of the soul. ⁵³

Socrates in Book 7 claims that a criterion for judging arises when something is perceived simultaneously with its opposite; this perception sets in motion the act of thinking (524e). ⁵⁴ I take this claim to be anticipated earlier in the discussion, when Socrates explicitly delimits the “art of judging” in the context of determining the pedagogical aim of the musical education of the guardians (409a-e). In order to make “healthy judgments (krinein hugios) about what is just” (409a) a good judge must have no personal experience of badness or injustice. He must be “a late learner of what injustice is,” having acquired this knowledge through “its study, as something alien in alien souls, over a long period of time” (409b). In other words, sound judgment requires knowledge of the nature of injustice, not as a property of one’s own soul but as apart from it. ⁵⁵ A soul that is itself unjust cannot judge well because “badness would never know virtue itself” (409d); the very nature of the unjust soul militates against the perception of virtue and is thus inadequate to the task of judging itself, so named in Book 7. The just soul, by contrast, is the precondition that makes possible an understanding of justice and its opposite: “virtue in an educated nature will in time gain knowledge of both itself and badness simultaneously” (409d-e). ⁵⁶ The educated nature to which Socrates is here referring is the just soul of his true musician (412a). The music that inculcates the virtue required of sound judgment, however, is not the music of a singular mode, whether Dorian or Phrygian; instead, it is the twofold, or simple music (haplos mousike) that results from the harmonization of the two (410a; 411a).

I noted earlier that the city in speech requires two kinds of music on the premise that although both inculcate moderation and courage, music in the Dorian mode is suited to the practice of war, or force, whereas music in the Phrygian mode is suited to the practice of peace, or freedom. In the context of fleshing out the musical requirements of sound judgment, Socrates now suggests that the modes correspond to particular parts of the soul: the Dorian to the spirited part and the Phrygian to the philosophic (410d-e). The guardians, Socrates insists, must have both natures insofar as they inculcate moderation and courage most perfectly when they are “harmonized with one another” (410e). The simple music (haplos mousike) that results from this harmonization, Socrates claims, engenders a spirit of law and order (425a). Damon’s ethical correlations are thus further mimetically differentiated when confronted with Platonic psychology: not only are the individual modes constitutive of particular ethical dispositions (spirited and philosophic), but also, when harmonized together, are constitutive of the most perfectly musical soul. As I argued previously, when Socrates likens the structure of the soul to the limiting notes in a musical scale (443d) he insists that the soul’s ability to produce its own harmony is neither given nor fixed by its musical constitution. Instead, the soul requires active tuning; it is this act of harmonization—the fitting together of constitutive parts within, and according to, an ordered structure—that Plato’s treatment of musical mimesis ultimately incorporates the ethical and juridical traditions he understood to be compromised by the New Music.

The treatment of musical mimesis in the Republic is thus to suggest that sound political judgment cannot be exercised in the absence of aesthetic ties that are also affective. Musical mimesis works in the service of developing a model of political judgment because first, it is an actualizing activity rather than simply a representational or imitative art, and because second, it actualizes disposition. In other words, in musical mimesis, Plato is wholly concerned with a kind of non-linguistic cognitive assimilation that prepares the soul for judgment; musical mimesis is the precondition to logos (speech, reasoned account) because of its ability to actualize in the soul the very passions and virtues required of sound judgment. If this accounting is correct, Plato’s treatment of musical mimesis may not only provide new ways for thinking about the aesthetic question in Plato but also its relation to the affective and the political more generally. The Republic’s treatment of music, and the Phrygian mode in particular, leaves open the possibility of recuperating inspiration as a compatible—and even an intrinsic—feature of mimesis itself, a possibility that is precluded in the more straightforward accounts of poetic mimesis in the Republic. ⁵⁷ Additionally, insofar as musical mimesis occurs within, and itself an instantiation of, a highly ordered structure that prefigures reason, it problematizes any strict correlation scholars want to draw between the precognitive and the irrational. ⁵⁸ Finally, questions having to do with musical mimesis precede and inform not only the quarrel between philosophy and poetry named in the Republic but also the role of deliberation, contestation, and other speech act in political ordering. Indeed, as this paper has demonstrated, Plato’s ideal city in speech is itself predicated on the kind of judgments—philosophical, poetic, and political—made possible by the affective condition of musical mimesis.