Because music has such excellent powers, presumably, Homer introduces Phemius playing and the Muses singing at the gods’ banquet. Aristotle, Politics, book 8, chapter 5, and Plato, Laws, book 2, highly approve of it, as do all writers on government. The Greeks and Romans honoured music and made it one of the liberal sciences, though it has now become a trade for hire.

All civilized commonwealths permit it. Gnaeus Manlius, as Livy relates, first brought singing women, performers, jesters, and every kind of music from Asia to Roman feasts in the year 567 from the founding of the city. Princes, emperors, and people of rank maintain it at their courts: no merriment without music.

In his ideal commonwealth of Utopia, Sir Thomas More allows music as an accompaniment to every meal, universally, for all ranks. Epictetus calls “a silent table a manger”—a table without music is a feeding trough. For “the harmony of musicians at a banquet is a carbuncle set in gold; and as an emerald signet richly mounted in gold, so is the melody of music at a pleasant banquet,” Ecclesiasticus 32:5–6.

When Louis XI invited Edward IV to Paris, he told him that a principal part of his entertainment would be children’s sweet voices, Ionian and Lydian tunes, and exquisite music; he should have a —— and the Cardinal of Bourbon as his confessor. Louis used this as a highly attractive inducement, as indeed it is to a sensual man.

Lucian, in his book On Dancing, is not ashamed to admit that he took immense delight in singing, dancing, music, women’s company, and similar pleasures. If you only heard them play and dance, he says, I know the spectacle would please you so much that you would dance along yourself; without doubt it would captivate you.

Scaliger likewise candidly confesses, in exercise 274: “Music affects me beyond all measure. I gladly watch them dance; the grace and beauty of lovely women hold and attract me powerfully, and I am happy to pass my time idly among them.” And what young man is not? As this is agreeable and beneficial to most people, it is especially so to a melancholy man.

Always provided that music was not the original cause of his illness: he must not be some flighty lover, some idle fantasist who dances in imagination all day and thinks only of composing jigs, sonnets, and madrigals in praise of his mistress. In such cases music is most harmful. Like a spur applied to a willing horse, it will make him run himself blind or ruin his wind. “For music is a stimulus to love”; music enchants, as Menander maintains. It will drive such melancholy people mad, and the sound of those jigs and hornpipes will stay in their ears for a week afterwards.

For this reason Plato forbids music and wine to all young men, because most of them are amorous, “lest fire be added to fire”—lest one fire increase another. Many people become melancholy through hearing music, but the melancholy it causes is pleasant. Therefore, for those who are discontented, distressed, afraid, sorrowful, or dejected, it is a remedy of immediate effect: it drives out cares, changes their grieving minds, and brings relief at once.

Otherwise, as Plutarch says, “music drives people out of their senses more than wine.” Music makes some people as wild as a tiger. Like Astolfo’s horn in Ariosto, or Mercury’s golden wand in Homer, which wakes some and sends others to sleep, it has different effects. Theophrastus rightly foretold that illnesses could either be brought on by music or relieved by it.