Aesthetics, History Of
In the West, the history of systematic philosophizing about the arts begins with Plato. But his great achievement was preceded, and prepared for, by certain developments in the preceding two hundred years, of which we know or can guess only a little. Thus, the famous aesthetic judgment—if such it was—of the picture on Achilles' shield, "That was a marvellous piece of work" (Iliad XVIII 548), hints at the beginning of wonder about imitation, i.e., the relation between representation and object, or appearance and reality. Plato shows the aesthetic consequences of the thinking on this problem by Democritus and Parmenides. Further, the elevation of Homer and Hesiod to the status of wise men and seers, and moral and religious teachers, led to a dispute over the truthfulness of poetry when they were attacked by Xenophanes and Heraclitus for their philosophical ignorance and misrepresentation of the gods. Homer and Hesiod themselves raised the question of the source of the artist's inspiration, which they attributed to divine power (Odyssey VIII; Theogony 22 ff.). Pindar traced this gift to the gods but allowed that the poet's skill can be developed by his own effort. Pythagoras and his Order discovered the dependence of musical intervals on the ratios of the lengths of stretched strings, generalized this discovery into a theory about the elements of the material world (that they either are, or depend upon, numbers), and developed an elaborate ethical and therapeutic theory of music, which, according to them, is capable of strengthening or restoring the harmony of the individual soul—harmonia being the term for the primary interval, the octave.
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