Two paradoxes which strike the modern reader as in the highest degree fanciful and ideal, and which suggest to him many reflections, are to be found in the third book of the Republic: first, the great power of music, so much beyond any influence which is experienced by us in modern times, when the art or science has been far more developed, and has found the secret of harmony, as well as of melody; secondly, the indefinite and almost absolute control which the soul is supposed to exercise over the body.
In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we may also observe among certain masters of the art, not unknown to us, at the present day.

With this natural enthusiasm, which is felt by a few only, there seems to mingle in Plato a sort of Pythagorean reverence for numbers and numerical proportion to which Aristotle is a stranger.
Intervals of sound and number are to him sacred things which have a law of their own, not dependent on the variations of sense.

They rise above sense, and become a connecting link with the world of ideas.

But it is evident that Plato is describing what to him appears to be also a fact.
The power of a simple and characteristic melody on the impressible mind of the Greek is more than we can easily appreciate.

The effect of national airs may bear some comparison with it.