Hidden “Plato code” is musical, mathematical and anti-Zeus
[Jay] Kennedy’s breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron this week, is based on stichometry: the measure of ancient texts by standard line lengths. Kennedy used a computer to restore the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato’s manuscripts to their original form, which would consist of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation. What he found was that within a margin of error of just one or two percent, many of Plato’s dialogues had line lengths based on round multiples of twelve hundred.
The Apology has 1,200 lines; the Protagoras, Cratylus, Philebus and Symposium each have 2,400 lines; the Gorgias 3,600; the Republic 12,200; and the Laws 14,400.
Kennedy argues that this is no accident. “We know that scribes were paid by the number of lines, library catalogues had the total number of lines, so everyone was counting lines,” he said. He believes that Plato was organising his texts according to a 12-note musical scale, attributed to Pythagoras, which he certainly knew about.
“My claim,” says Kennedy, “is that Plato used that technology of line counting to keep track of where he was in his text and to embed symbolic passages at regular intervals.” Knowing how he did so “unlocks the gate to the labyrinth of symbolic messages in Plato”.
Believing that this pattern corresponds to the 12-note musical scale widely used by Pythagoreans, Kennedy divided the texts into equal 12ths and found that “significant concepts and narrative turns” within the dialogues are generally located at their junctures. Positive concepts are lodged at the harmonious third, fourth, sixth, eight and ninth “notes”, which were considered to be most harmonious with the 12th; while negative concepts are found at the more dissonant fifth, seventh, 10th and 11th.
…
The secrecy was because Plato’s was “a dangerous idea”, claims Kennedy. “It meant that mathematical law governed the universe and not Zeus.” Given that Plato’s teacher, Socrates, had been executed for sowing impiety among the youth he would have been “very cautious abut revealing doctrines that threaten the gods of Olympus”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/plato-mathematical-musical-code
Is Julian Baggini actually taking this thesis seriously? He doesn’t seem to make any judgment on it one way or another. To me, coming from a mathematical background, it’s self-evident crap. It may well be true that Plato’s texts divide naturally into 1200 line sections, and that particular emphases occur at regular intervals. But this is true of my own writing, which tends to be on A4 sheets of paper, which have space for a certain number of lines, and which I tend to squeeze the text into, so as not to leave a few lines on an otherwise blank sheet. And naturally the conclusions always come at the end of the sheet, and important stages in the argument tend to be reached around the middle. In any case I thought the music of the Greeks was based on the five-note scale. The so-called “comma” of Pythagoras was no doubt known to his followers, but I don’t think they were secretly into twelve-tone music, presumably played silently, like the “music of the spheres” to avoid annoying the neighbours!.
I thought I smelled bullsh1t too. (should that be smelled or smelt?).