As to the other delights of the mind, we have already treated of them,
as they occurred to us. But their aversedness and dislike to music,
that affords us so great delights and such charming satisfactions, a
man could not forget if he would, by reason of the inconsistency of what
Epicurus saith, when he pronounceth in his book called his Doubts that
his wise man ought to be a lover of public spectacles and to delight
above any other man in the music and shows of the Bacchanals; and yet
he will not admit of music problems or of the critical inquiries of
philologists, no, not so much as at a compotation. Yea, he advises such
princes as are lovers of the Muses rather to entertain themselves at
their feasts either with some narration of military adventures or with
the importune scurrilities of drolls and buffoons, than to engage in
disputes about music or in questions of poetry. For this very thing he
had the face to write in his treatise of Monarchy, as if he were writing
to Sardanapalus, or to Nanarus ruler of Babylon. For neither would a
Hiero nor an Attalus nor an Archelaus be persuaded to make a Euripides,
a Simonides, a Melanippides, a Crates, or a Diodotus rise up from their
tables, and to place such scaramuchios in their rooms as a Cardax, an
Agrias, or a Callias, or fellows like Thrasonides and Thrasyleon, to
make people disorder the house with hollowing and clapping. Had the
great Ptolemy, who was the first that formed a consort of musicians, but
met with these excellent and royal admonitions, would he not, think you,
have thus addressed himself to the Samians:--
O Muse, whence art thou thus maligned?
For certainly it can never belong to any Athenian to be in such enmity
and hostility with the Muses. But
No animal accurst by Jove
Music's sweet charms can ever love.
(Pindar, "Pythian," i. 25.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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