Music and Emotions

The chapter surveys ancient philosophical approaches to music and emotions by analyzing how the emotional impact of music is conceived in some Greek and Latin sources. After a preliminary section aimed at introducing the main methodological issues raised by the study of this topic in Antiquity and presenting an outline of the chapter, in the first part I shall focus on two pivotal analyses of the emotional impact of music—those of Plato and Aristotle—and the remarks on emotion in Theophrastus’ extant fragments on music. The second part explores the principal Epicurean and Stoic interpretations of the emotional effects of music, with their focus on the cognitive processes involved in the musical experience.