Abstract
“Our songs have become laws!” Plato exclaims in one of his relentless puns in the dialogue Laws, this time on nomoi meaning both “law” and a “traditional melody” forthe recitation of the epics.1 This last political treatise, its revision uncompleted when he died in 347 B.C. at the age of 80, is so extravagant with such references to music, however, that scholars assume Plato must either have been senile or joking. The possibility that a number of unsolved mathematical riddles in Laws may have a musical rationale, that Plato may have designed for the interior of Crete his “practicable city of Magnesia” exactly as he claimed—on a musical model—has apparently never been explored.
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