Archestratus (music theorist)

Archestratus (Greek: Ἀρχέστρατος Archestratos) was a harmonic theorist in the Peripatetic tradition and probably lived in the early 3rd century BC. Little is known of his life and career. Athenaeus' reference (XIV.634d) to an Archestratus who wrote On auletes (Περὶ αὐλητῶν) in two books is perhaps to him; it is a "rather remote" possibility that he is identical with Archestratus of Syracuse.

The most substantial evidence for Archestratus' ideas is in a passage of Porphyry's commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics, pp. 26–27 Düring:

After supporting what he [Didymus has said with further evidence, which I shall use more appropriately later, he adds: "And there are others who give a place to both perception and reason, but who assign a certain priority to reason; one of them is Archestratus."

It would be helpful to digress a little and clarify this man's approach, to the extent that it will assist in outlining things that are useful to us now. He declared that there are three notes in all, the barypyknos, the oxypyknos and the amphipyknos. He says that the barypyknos is the one from which one can place a pyknon on the lower side, the oxypyknos, conversely, is that from which one can place a pyknon on the upper side, and the amphipyknos is that which takes the position between them. And each of them is embraced in a single note, since it is possible for it <to occupy> several pitches, and to weave a melody among them while the pitch continues to be of one form, as <it is possible> for both <of the hypatai> and <the> paramesê and all such notes to be oxypyknoi, or so he says.

In this way it turns out that on the one hand he uses sense-perception as a criterion too, since without it the particular items that he adopts would not be apparent, the note, for example, and <the thesis that> there are only three places for it in the pyknon. For this is confirmed through <the proposition that> a pyknon is not placed next to a pyknon either as a whole or in part. The theorem as a whole, however, is put together on the basis of reason (logikôs); for <the proposition that> the forms of the notes are of these sorts is worked out by reason, since they are specific orderings of the relation between the notes. And what one might call the "conclusion" of the theorem – since it is rather sophistic to speak only of the form of a note and thus to leave it as something purely intelligible (noêton) – is obviously based wholly on reason. From this, then, let this approach, too, have been shown.

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