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Aristoxenus

Aristoxenus

c. 375 BCE–c. 315 BCE · Athens

Aristoxenus of Tarentum was a Greek philosopher and music theorist of the 4th century BCE, a pupil of Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. He is best known for his 'Elements of Harmonics,' the most important surviving ancient treatise on music theory, in which he treated harmony through the trained ear rather than purely through numerical ratios. He also wrote on rhythm and produced biographies of philosophers, now largely lost.

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AthensAttica (Greece)

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About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

Democritus, Antisthenes, Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Aristoxenus’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aristoxenus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(1)