The image of Plato on basic musical paideia is well known, and the utilisation of music in education is easily the most studied aspect of all the Platonic reflections on the phenomenon of music. Great attention has been paid to the interesting accounts – developed above all in the Republicii–iii and in the Lawsii and vii – of a State music, a powerful instrument in forming and directing the emotivity and morality of citizens.

In this first chapter, we will analyse musical paideia in the Republic and the Laws, as we consider that it implies important psychological questions. The interaction between soul and body will be evaluated, for example, with respect to the particular condition of infants; there will follow an analysis of the description, in physical or magical terms, of the formative effect that music has on the soul and we will endeavour to characterise the physiognomy of the psychic interlocutor of music, or rather that part of the soul on which music chiefly acts. For most of the chapter, I will try to reconstruct the form that the ēthos theory assumes in contact with Platonic psychology and to clarify the psychological mechanisms that Plato held to be operative behind the idea that music conditions the character and represents mental states.