12 - Music all pow'rful

Summary

INTRODUCTION

I've been checking out the word “music” in indexes to some standard works in English on the Republic and to some recent “companions” to the dialogue. No mention in the index to Cross and Woozley's Philosophical Commentary of 1964, nor in that to Annas' Introduction of 1981. This isn't a deficiency in the indexing. Music doesn't figure in the texts either very much. Of course, both these books were written BBE: before the Barker era, i.e., before the publication of Andrew Barker's revelatory two volume Greek Musical Writings. But things are not much different with Santas's Blackwell Guide of 2006 (no reference to music in the index, nor to Barker in bibliographies), or Ferrari's Cambridge Companion of 2007 (his index does capture a couple of passing references, to music as an ingredient in the education for the guards set out in Books 2 and 3, but in discussions which mainly have other fish to fry). There's actually more about music in Gabriel Richardson Lear's chapter on the beautiful in Santas, and in the discussion there of “musical-poetic education,” although Ferrari's massive 627-item bibliographie raisonnée lists the section entitled “Musica e carratere nella Reppublica di Platone” in Barker's more recent Psicomusicologia nella Grecia antica (2005), as well as to two or three other pieces – none in English – on the topic.

Anglophone students might conclude that music plays no central role in the argument of the Republic: would they be right?