Hello, I want to get a famous Plato quote translated into ancient greek, could you please translate it for me?
The quote is...
"Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue."
Could you also translate 'Plato' into ancient greek please.
Jane, my first response was to say that this statement could not have been made by Plato, who could never have given such a blanket endorsement to the effects of music; he consistently expressed his distrust of poets and musicians, who regularly put words, melodies, and gestures together inappropriately. The resulting mix, in his opinion, tended to lead the young not towards, but away from, virtue.
Nevertheless, the “quote” you cite is all over the Internet, always in those exact words, and always attributed to Plato without reference to a specific text. The origin of the quotation was finally pointed out to me by Forum administrator nickel (aka The Fontmaster). It’s from Plato's
Laws 673a, and it goes like this:
Τὰ μὲν τοίνυν τῆς φωνῆς μέχρι τῆς ψυχῆς πρὸς ἀρετὴν παιδείας οὐκ οἶδ’ ὅντινα τρόπον ὠνομάσαμεν μουσικήν.
This text refers to a previous discussion of the proper composition and interaction of music and dance, and describes music not as it is commonly practiced (e.g., making instruments independent of, rather than subordinate to, the human voice), but as an ideal. Here is a more or less literal translation:
“We’ve managed somehow to give the name of music to those properties of the voice [the ‘ movement’ of the voice had just been compared to the movement of the body in choral dance ] which pertain to the education of the soul towards virtue.”
The Jowett translation (still, for most of Plato, the only accessible English version) gives a loose interpretation, which probably became the basis for your quotation:
“And the sound of the voice which reaches and educates the soul, we have ventured to term music.”
So the form of the quotation you cited is not entirely consistent with Plato’s original sense. Here, as often in literary interpretation, there’s a fine line between confusion and oversimplification. Sorry to be so long-winded and complex.
Plato’s name in Greek is simpler to convey:
Πλάτων.