ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to address the problems caused by the omission, to suggest some possible reasons for it, and in the process to define more clearly the role of instruments as tools of persuasion in Aristoxenus' harmonics. Aristoxenus defined harmonics as the science concerned with all melody, and it is the subject of the collection of writings that we have received from the manuscript tradition as the Elementa harmonica. The prevailing view is that the Elementa harmonica is not a unified treatise but an incomplete assembly of Aristoxenus' attempts, in at least two phases of his career, at a systematic exposition of the science of harmonics. Aristoxenus sets out a procedure designed to settle a controversy over the measurement of an important musical interval by others smaller than it. Aristoxenus' articulation of the well-attuned structures of music is framed in these terms: how large or small the constituent intervals are, and what their function is within the wider whole.
