I want to think that Plato has in mind the tuning of the strings of a lyre. I suppose that each string of the lyre may be tuned to different pitches, in order to accomodate the key (or mode) of a song. The LCL translates ἁρμονία as “attunement”.
Following this supposition, I want to understand the text in this way:
Harmony is by nature [nothing more than] how each tuning [of, for example a lyre,] is ordered.
But I may be confusing myself with this conjecture.
This is how I read it: it’s a rhetorical question expecting a positive answer, ἑκάστη ἁρμονία is the subject ,and ἁρμονία the predicate.
Isn’t by nature each attunement such an attunement in the way as it was attuned?
Hi Hugh,
The whole passage is notoriously problematic (I have a squiggly line alongside it in my text together with a question mark from when I read it many years ago), but you seem to me to have it right. I read it differently from bedwere. I take αρμονια to be the subject, and ἑκάστη ἁρμονία to be the subject of the indefinite ὡς clause (a mild hyperbaton): i.e. something like “Isn’t it in the nature of αρμονια to be just as each tuning is tuned?” (or “according as each …”). I wouldn’t translate αρμονια as harmony, since it’s not what’s meant by harmony today; rather “tuning,” or “attunement” as bedwere has it. And it won’t only be a matter of the pitch to which each string is tuned but also (or rather) the pitch relations of the variously tuned strings, which subsequent musicologists thoroughly systematized.
Many thanks to bedware and mwh for those helpful replies.
I’m glad to learn that this is a difficult passage. I take the point that ἁρμονία in AG is not a good match for harmony in English,
As I read subsequent sentences, I was having trouble clinging to the meaning I suggested. This is what gave rise to my question. I think as I continue to study the Phaedo, I won’t worry so much about perfect understanding. Sometimes, with philosophical writing I have to do that.
Thanks mwh for spelling that out. When I stepped through this part of your reply, I saw that part of my perplexity had been uncertainty about this grammatical relationship.