Aristoxenus
historical figure · 3 works · 5 mentions · 6 anchored passages
in the texts
Tusculan Disputations
Musician and philosopher who theorized the soul as a bodily harmony, later gently mocked for over-applying musical theory.
of whom the one seems never even to have suffered pain, since he does not feel that he has a soul, while the other so delights in his own music that he tries to transfer it even to these matters.
As, long before, the ancients, and most recently Aristoxenus, a musician and likewise a philosopher, held the soul to be a certain tension of the body itself, like the thing called harmony in song and on the strings:
Dicaearchus and Aristoxenus, because it was hard to understand what the soul was or of what sort, said there was no soul at all.
Stromata
Author of the Life of Pythagoras, cited on Pythagoras's ethnicity.
but as Aristoxenus, in his Life of Pythagoras, and Aristarchus and Theopompus say, he was a Tyrrhenian;
And it well suits the enharmonic genus to the Dorian harmony, and the diatonic to the Phrygian, as Aristoxenus says.
On Moral Ends
Ancient theorist of music, cited as example of genius devoted to a discipline.
How great a genius of Aristoxenus do we see consumed in music?