Hammering blacksmiths

Music also helped children learn the principles of mathematics, another key area of ancient Greek education. The philosopher Pythagoras realised the importance of harmonics and how music related to mathematics when he heard blacksmiths hammering in their forge, so the legend goes. For Pythagoras and his followers, music was a mathematical expression of the cosmic order. The frontispiece to the first volume of Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650), engraved by Baronius of Rome after a drawing by John Paul Schor, alludes to this myth. It shows the blacksmiths hammering in a cave, while Pythagoras points to them with a stick. The legacy of ancient Greek music—and its education–have been an important part of western music and its development and therefore remain part of our everyday lives.

You can find a copy of this text in the University of Reading’s Special Collections.