The dithyramb,
for example, is acknowledged to be Phrygian, a fact of which the
connoisseurs of music offer many proofs, saying, among other things,
that Philoxenus, having attempted to compose his Mysians as a
dithyramb in the Dorian mode, found it impossible, and fell back by
the very nature of things into the more appropriate Phrygian. All
men agree that the Dorian music is the gravest and manliest. And
whereas we say that the extremes should be avoided and the mean
followed, and whereas the Dorian is a mean between the other modes, it
is evident that our youth should be taught the Dorian music.
Two principles have to be kept in view, what is possible, what is
becoming: at these every man ought to aim. But even these are relative
to age; the old, who have lost their powers, cannot very well sing the
high-strung modes, and nature herself seems to suggest that their
songs should be of the more relaxed kind. Wherefore the musicians
likewise blame Socrates, and with justice, for rejecting the relaxed
modes in education under the idea that they are intoxicating, not in
the ordinary sense of intoxication (for wine rather tends to excite
men), but because they have no strength in them. And so, with a view
also to the time of life when men begin to grow old, they ought to
practice the gentler modes and melodies as well as the others, and,
further, any mode, such as the Lydian above all others appears to
be, which is suited to children of tender age, and possesses the
elements both of order and of education.
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