Laura CAROLINA DURÁN

Original title: Ptolemaïs de Cirene (siglo III a. C.) y la teoría musical en la antigua Grecia

Published in Rhythms, expressions and representations of the body

Keywords: Aristoxenics, Greek Music Theory, Perception vs. Reason, Ptolemaïs of Cyrene, Pythagoreans.

Giles Menage in his History of Women Philosophers mentions Ptolemaïs of Cyrene as a Pythagorean not entirely committed to that school, he thinks that she was probably a contemporary of the Empress Julia Domna, since by her example many women dedicated themselves to studies. Ptolemaïs is the only woman music theorist from Greek Antiquity whose texts are preserved, but we lack biographical data about her. Porphyry’s Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonica contains a series of fragments, of variable lenght, from Ptolemaïs’s Pythagorean Elements of Music. In these texts, the female author presents the epistemological commitmets and methodologies of various schools of ancient musical traditions that she divides into two large groups: the mousikoí or Aristoxenics and the kanonikoí or Pythagoreans. These schools have a different understanding of the use of perception and reason in relation to musical knowledge. Pythagorean music theory was base on mathematical principles, while Aristoxenus favored the use of sensory data. When dealing with these themes, Ptolemaïs dedicates herself to the philosophical problema of the scope of reason and perception, a discussion of the mind-body dilema that has traversed the history of philosophy addressed in a philosophical-musical setting. In this work I present and analyze the perserved texts of the female autor, which will allow us to measure the importance of this female figure in the history of philosophical thought about music, while at the same time rescuing her from oblivion in Western culture.