Of the life of Aristides Quintilianus nothing is known, and though he refers in the De Musica to a treatise on poetics, we have nothing from his pen except the present work. He cannot be earlier than the first century a.d., since he mentions Cicero as a figure from the past, and the use made of his book by Martianus Capella guarantees that he is no later than the fourth. Beyond this the matter is uncertain. The most recent commentator (Mathiesen 1983) inclines to the view that his brand of Neoplatonism aligns him with Plotinus and Porphyry, which would place him in or after the late third century, and Mathiesen identifies a number of passages that may have been drawn from Porphyry's Commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics. (Aristides does not seem to have been directly acquainted with Ptolemy's work.) This suggestion has a good deal in its favour, though a few considerations might point to an earlier date; Mathiesen's introduction should be consulted for details.

Aristides' aim, as he explains in Book I ch. 2, is to put everything relevant to the study of music together in a single treatise. This, he says, no previous writer had done, and in view of the vast scope of his conception of the subject, he may well be right. Most of his themes had been touched on by others, but no author we know of (not even Ptolemy) had attempted to articulate them all in such detail in one work, and within a single unifying framework.