In Laws 7.817a–d we find the following passage:

INTRODUCTION

The opening word of the Laws is “god” (theos). The existence and nature of the gods is of central importance in this dialogue, and the focus of attention in Book 10. Yet much of what Plato says about them is imprecise or incomplete.

The Laws is a difficult work presented in relatively difficult Greek. Book 10 – arguably the most philosophically challenging of the dialogue's twelve books – is especially dense and (at times, it seems) unfathomable. This may in part be the result of its unfinished state. Diogenes Laertius famously reports that “some say that Philip of Opus transcribed the Laws, which was in wax” (III 37). It is not unreasonable to conclude that the Laws may have been in a less than polished state when Plato died. Further, to mention a problem not limited to the Platonic corpus, of course, the centuries-long transmission of this work from the fourth century bc to the medieval period doubtless left its marks on the text we possess.

Some of the ambiguities or uncertainties surrounding Plato's account of the gods in the Laws are likely the result of such causes. For example, one passage in his description of the atheistic conception of reality (10. 889b–e) is aptly described by Trevor Saunders as “stuffed with vague words of uncertain reference” (1972: 91).

PLATO'S FUNDAMENTAL INSIGHT

The principal thesis of this chapter is that Plato's Republic and Laws should be read together as explorations of a theme that fascinates Plato at every stage of his career: the ability of those who have more understanding of what is valuable to lead those who have less. Notice that I say less understanding rather than none. Plato believes that human beings need not be put into one of two exhaustive categories: those who have perfect understanding of what is good, and those who are utterly ignorant of value. Most people, he assumes, fall somewhere between these extremes; and if someone has an unusually good understanding of value, it is appropriate – in fact, it may even be necessary – for him to try to educate those whose grasp of the good is smaller, but who are nonetheless educable. Not everyone, unfortunately, is educable. Plato holds that there can be no common understanding and therefore no stable political cooperation between those who are irreversibly sunk in ignorance and those who have a fuller (yet still imperfect) understanding of what is good. The hope that animates his political philosophy, from its initial steps to its culmination in the Laws, is that those who have some small grasp of value can form a community with those whose cognitive and ethical achievements are greater.

It is well known that the concept of to kalon in ancient Greek occurs in a wide variety of contexts. It applies to physical beauty, but it is also common in ethical contexts, where “honorable” or “noble” are often appropriate English translations, and where Cicero regularly Latinizes it as honestum. Nor does this exhaust the possible applications of the concept, to judge from the range of objects that receive the label kalon in Plato's dialogue devoted to the topic, the Hippias Major; not only gods and beautiful young women, but also horses, lyres, cooking pots, and soup ladles are described as kala, apparently without controversy. In the last two cases, at any rate, what seems to entitle them to the epithet kalon, if it is justified, is not anything to do with a pleasing physical appearance, but, roughly, their appropriateness for the job they are supposed to do. No doubt this multiplicity of possible applications is one reason why Socrates and Hippias fail to find a satisfactory definition of to kalon, and why their various attempted definitions are so extremely different from one another. Although it is a recurring contention of Socrates in Plato's dialogues that each word must have a unitary sense in all of its various occurrences, the example of the term to kalon, as illustrated by the Hippias Major, seems to put that contention into question.

PREFACE: PLATO ON THE NATURE OF PLEASURE

Pleasure in Plato is a highly controversial issue. The controversy is not just over the evaluation of pleasure within Plato's ethics, that is, whether he regards it as an overall good or bad thing, but what he takes the nature of pleasure to be. There is conflicting evidence on this issue in the different dialogues. This is in itself not particularly disturbing, because there is conflicting evidence on most central concepts in Plato's philosophy. One of the main reasons for such diaphonia is that Plato never speaks in his own name and lets different speakers express different views at different occasions, including Socrates himself. Another, equally important reason lies in the fact that Plato's writings, as far as we know, reflect over fifty years of authorship. Whether one favours a unitary, a developmentalist, or a revisionist reading of Plato, there are bound to be differences, at least in approach and perspective. But in the case of pleasure there is more than that. There is clearly some change, if not revision. Since the spectrum of Plato's views on this issue may be important for the evaluation of the role assigned to pleasure and its counterpart, pain, in the Laws, a brief overview of Plato's different treatments of pleasure is apposite, an overview that must necessarily remain superficial and at the same time controversial because Plato treats this concept in different ways and from different angles.

It is common to begin an article or a book on Plato's Laws with the lament that the Laws has generally been neglected. Although it remains true that the dialogue has been vastly under-studied, much more has been written on it since the late 1990s or so. This volume is not intended to summarize that literature for the general reader. Instead it offers chapters that are on the cutting edge of current scholarship and that not only contribute to ongoing debates, but also start fresh lines of inquiry.

The Laws is the longest of Plato's dialogues and probably the last (given its length, its composition may have overlapped with that of other late dialogues). Aristotle reports (Politics 2.6) that it is later than the Republic, and there is internal and external evidence that it did not receive its final touches before Plato died. In the Laws, Plato returns to the project of describing the foundation of a just or good city and sketches in considerable detail its constitution, laws, offices, and other social institutions. The dialogue is set on Crete and consists of a conversation in twelve books among an Athenian Visitor (by far and away the main speaker) and his two interlocutors: Megillus, a Spartan, and Kleinias, a Cretan. Their introductory conversation in the first three books is on topics relevant to lawmaking: the proper aim (telos) of legislation, which is the happiness (eudaimonia) and virtue of the citizens; the nature of virtue; some issues in ethical psychology; and the history of constitutions.

If there is no doubt that the break-up of sound is the point ‘where everything ought to arrive’, (530e6) for the interlocutors of the Republic, it is not necessarily Plato's last word on music. I would like to consider taking a different route through the dialogues (in particular the Republic and the Timaeus), following sonority and endeavouring to define the features of the presence of music in the body and soul.

In the first part of the chapter, I will deal with the passages in which Plato treats the acoustic phenomena and their perception. Firstly, we will consider the literary aspect, which is also important when highlighting the attention that Plato dedicates to the dimensions of sound and hearing. Then we will tackle the analysis of two passages in the Timaeus that are fundamental to Plato's treatment of the reception of musical phenomena, but which are relatively problematic. We will evaluate these passages in relation to the theories of perception in the Timaeus and the ancient theories of music and acoustics.

Following on, in the second half of the chapter I will concentrate on the parts in which the psychē and the correct functioning of the psychē are described in musical and harmonic terms. Socrates rejects a theory of soul-harmony in the Phaedo, but we shall see that, through the dialogues, Plato retrieves and re-elaborates the idea of a harmonic order of the soul as he moves from the Republic to the Timaeus.

The main objective of this book has been to understand if and how the Platonic analysis of the musical phenomenon can throw light on Plato's ideas of the relationships between soul and body and of cognitive, emotive and perceptive processes. But it has also been necessary to confront general themes relative to ancient Greek music, in two areas in particular: the theories on the representative, expressive and formative possibilities of music; and the acoustic theories of the creation, diffusion and perception of sound.

With regard to the first of these areas, the analysis of musical paideia in Resp. ii–iii and Leg. ii and vii has brought to light a notion of mousikē with two distinct characteristics: (1) its ability to represent very precise contents and to impress them on the psychē; (2) the close interconnection between its components (words, harmony, rhythm and dance), according to precise hierarchical relationships. We should certainly not ignore the ideal and projective character of mousikē; nevertheless we can consider (1) and (2) typical aspects of ancient Greek music, at least to a certain extent and at a certain point. That which Plato attempts to invigorate, and ends up by transforming, is a traditional ideal of music.

The analysis undertaken in this study has offered lines of inquiry that lead to an understanding of the relationship between (1) and (2). When considering the representative and formative powers of mousikē we should bear in mind that it could count on various languages to communicate its contents.

Proceeding with the analysis of the ways in which music intervenes on rationality, we encounter a part of Plato's reflection on music that is as famous as it is debated: the treatment of harmonic science in Resp. vii. The condition in which music, as a science of harmony, is admitted into the curriculum preparatory to dialectic is that it represents a discipline of conversion from sensible to intelligible. In the first part of the chapter we will see that this condition is satisfied if the mathēmata train certain psychic processes; and we will see that a study with an empirical stamp represents a risk in the case of the first four disciplines, in particular as regards harmonics' ‘kindred’ science, astronomy. In the second part, I will concentrate on Resp. 530d–531c, where Plato distances himself from both empirical and Pythagorean harmonic science. Here we will endeavour to define the ideal science of harmony and the analysis to which Plato subjects the intelligible and sensible content of music in this context.

HARMONICS BEYOND SOUND

A deep divergence separates the two great reflections on music in the Republic: on the one hand, that on mousikē in a basic paideia for the formation of sensibility, on the other, the reflection on harmonics in a programme of instruction for the future dialectians with the objective of shaping rationality.

We have seen that Plato places great faith in the power of music to shape and condition the psychē in its components that are most connected to sensibility; but he seems to place as much faith in the power of music to intervene on the rational psychē. In this second chapter I will concentrate on one of the two places in which Plato tackles the musical treatment of reason. I refer to Tim. 47c–e, the passage where music first makes its appearance in the Timaeus, a dialogue that dedicates particular attention to musical arguments, as we shall see. I mean to consider the intervention of music on the rational soul from the perspective of the ontological affinity between the two realities, as emerges here and in other parts of the Timaeus. Then I will examine the processes – kinetic, cognitive, emotive and perceptive – on which the re-ordering intervention of music on rationality is based. The second part of the chapter I intend to dedicate, in particular, to the impact of music on the intellective and emotive functions.

THE ALLIANCE OF MUSIC AND SOUL

The first reference to music to be found in the Timaeus appears in a reflection on the profound use of hearing (47c4–e2) and takes up a significant part of it (47c7–e2): we find ourselves unexpectedly facing one of the most interesting and complex observations on music expressed by Plato in the dialogues.

MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY

In the Phaedo (60d–61b), Socrates confesses that throughout his life he had interpreted the oneiric warning: ‘practise and compose music’ (mousikēn poiei kai ergazou) as an invitation to practise the ‘greatest music’ (megistē mousikē) that is philosophy. Now, however, close to death, he decides to consider the words from his dream in a different light. Not without a certain unease, he engages in ‘popular music’ (dēmōdēs mousikē), which concerns poetry and myth, rather than philosophy and ‘arguments’ (logoi). So it is that the Phaedo opens with two entirely different meanings of music: music in the commonly accepted sense and music that, in the very uncommon sense, is identified with philosophy.

For anyone embarking on a discussion of music, soul and body in Plato, the dream scene gives some indication of what such an analysis involves. In the first place is the need to take on board, as far as possible, the meanings and value of a music that is no longer ‘popular’; in the second place, the need to find characteristics that are still less clear, of the highest form of music that is assimilated to philosophy. With these two tasks – finding the significance of mousikē, and the significance of mousikē that has undergone Platonic investigation – we get to the heart of the analysis that Plato dedicates to the musical phenomenon and its relationship with philosophy.