Symposium

poets here¹ say and I am persuaded, founded our craft. So medicine, as I say, all of it, 187a is steered through this god, and in the same way gymnastics and farming too; and music, it is quite plain to anyone who pays even a little attention, is in the same case as these, as perhaps Heraclitus too means to say, since in his expressions at least he does not say it well. For he says that the one, ‘differing from itself, is in accord with itself,’ ‘like the harmony of a bow and a lyre.’² But it is a great want of sense to say that a harmony differs, or is made of things that still differ. But perhaps he meant this: that from 187b the high and the low, which differed before and afterwards agreed, it has come into being by the craft of music. For surely there could be no harmony from the high and the low while they still differ; for harmony is consonance, and consonance a kind of agreement — and agreement from things that differ, while they differ, is impossible; and again, what differs and does not agree it is impossible to harmonize — just as rhythm too has come into being from the fast and the 187c slow, which had differed before but afterwards agreed. And the agreement in all these, as medicine does there, here music puts in, implanting love and concord for one another; and music in its turn is knowledge of matters of love concerning harmony and rhythm. And in the very composition of harmony and rhythm it is not at all hard to distinguish the matters of love, nor is the double love there yet;³ but when one has to use 187d rhythm and harmony on human beings, either in making, which they call song-making, or in using rightly the songs and metres already made, which has been called education, then it is hard, and there is need of a good craftsman. For the same account comes back again: that one must gratify the orderly among human beings — and so that those who are not yet orderly may become more orderly — and guard their