ARISTOXENUS of Tarentum (4th century B.c.), a Greek peripatetic philosopher and writer on music and rhythm. He studied under the Pythagoreans and later under Aristotle, and wrote on philosophy, ethics and music. The empirical tendency of his thought is shown in his theory that the soul is related to the body as harmony to the parts of a musical instrument. In music he held that the notes of the scale are to be judged, not as the Pythagoreans held, by mathematical ratio, but by the ear. The only work of his that has come down to us is the three books of the Elements of Harmony (jfiOµisc& oToeXEi& ), an incomplete musical treatise. Grenfell and Hunt's Oxyrhynchus Papyri (vol. i., 1898), contains a five-column fragment of a treatise on metre, probably this treatise of Aristoxenus.
See also W. L. Mahne, Diatribe de Aristoxeno (Amsterdam, 1793) ; B. Brill, Aristoxenus' rhythmische and metrische Messungen (1871) ; R. Westphal, Griechische Rhythmik and Harmonik (Leipzig, 1867) ; L. Laloy, Aristoxene de Tarente et la musique de l'antiquite (Paris, 1904) . See PERIPATETICS, PYTHAGORAS (Music) and art. "Greek Music" in Grove's Diet. of Music (1904). For the Oxyrhynchus fragment see Classical Review (Jan. 1898) and C. van Jan in Bur sian's Jahresbericht, civ. (1900.