To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed
In perfect diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good.
—Milton.
Music is mentioned with a degree of rapture in more than fifty places of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Lacedæmonians had a flute blazoned on their standards, and the military airs composed by Tyrtæus continued to be played in the Spartan army until the end of the republic.
The Pythagoreans and Platonists not only supposed the soul of man to be a substance very like a disembodied musical instrument of some sort, but believed the universe itself and all its parts to be formed on the principles of harmony; hence their not altogether imaginary music of the spheres which enters into their systems of philosophy:
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,