IF there is any room for an insignificant person like myself, Members of the University, after you have heard so many eminent speakers, I too will attempt, to the best of my small powers, to show my appreciation of this day's solemn celebrations, and to follow, though at a distance, the festal train of eloquence today. And so, though I should in any case shun and avoid the usual trite and hackneyed topics, I am fired and aroused to do my utmost to find some novel theme by the thought of this day's importance and of our speakers who, as was to be expected, have already paid such worthy tribute to it. These two considerations might well suffice to stimulate and spur on even a dull and sluggish brain. So I conceived the idea of making a few preliminary remarks with open hand, as we say, and rhetorical exuberance, on the subject of that heavenly harmony which is presently to be discussed as it were with closed fist—but this with an eye to the time at my disposal, which is now strictly limited.

Now I beg you, my hearers, not to take this theory as seriously intended. For who in his senses would suppose that Pythagoras, a very god among philosophers, whose name all men of that time hailed with the most profound reverence—who, I ask, would suppose that he had ever put forward a theory based on such very poor foundations? Surely, if he held any doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, or taught that the heavens revolve in unison with some sweet melody, it was only as a means of suggesting allegorically the close interrelation of the orbs and their uniform revolution in accordance with the laws of destiny for ever. In this he followed the example of the poets, or (what is almost the same thing) of the divine oracles, who never display before the eyes of the vulgar any holy or secret mystery unless it be in some way cloaked or veiled.

Pythagoras was followed by Plato, that best interpreter of Mother Nature; he tells us that upon each one of the celestial orbs is seated a being called a Siren, at whose mellifluous song both gods and men are rapt in wonder.

Homer moreover used the remarkable and apt metaphor of the golden chain suspended by Jove from heaven to represent this universal concord and sweet union of all things which Pythagoras poetically figures as harmony.

Then Aristotle, the rival and constant detractor of Pythagoras and Plato, wishing to construct a road to fame on the ruins of these great masters' theories, foisted on Pythagoras the literal doctrine of the unheard symphony of heaven and of the melody of the spheres. But if only fate or chance had allowed your soul, O Father Pythagoras, to transmigrate into my body, you would not have lacked a champion to deliver you without difficulty, under however heavy a burden of obloquy you might be labouring!

After all, we may well ask, why should not the heavenly bodies give forth musical tones in their annual revolutions? Does it not seem reasonable to you, Aristotle? Why, I can hardly believe that those Intelligences of yours could have endured through so many centuries the sedentary toil of making the heavens rotate, if the ineffable music of the stars had not prevented them from leaving their posts, and the melody, by its enchantment, persuaded them to stay. If you rob the heavens of this music, you devote those wonderful minds and subordinate gods of yours to a life of drudgery, and condemn them to the treadmill. And even Atlas himself would long since have cast down the burden of the skies from his shoulders to its ruin, had not that sweet harmony soothed him with an ecstasy of delight as he panted and sweated beneath his heavy load. Again, the Dolphin would long since have wearied of the stars and preferred his proper element of the sea to the skies, had he not well known that the singing of the spheres of heaven far surpassed Arion's lyre in sweetness. And we may well believe that it is in order to tune their own notes in accord with that harmony of heaven to which they listen so intently, that the lark takes her flight up into the clouds at daybreak and the nightingale passes the lonely hours of night in song.

Hence arose the story, which has prevailed since the earliest times, of how the Muses dance before Jove's altar day and night; hence too the attribution to Phoebus, in the remote past, of musical skill. Hence the belief held by revered antiquity that Harmonia was the daughter of Jove and Electra, and that at her marriage to Cadmus all the choirs of heaven sang in concert.

What if no one on earth has ever heard this symphony of the stars? It does not therefore follow that everything beyond the sphere of the moon is mute and utterly benumbed in silence. The fault is in our own deaf ears, which are either unable or unworthy to hear these sweet strains.

But this melody is not all unheard. For who, O Aristotle, could believe that those goats you tell of keep skipping in the midmost tracts of air for any other reason than that when they plainly hear the orchestra of heaven, being so near at hand, they cannot choose but dance?

Again, Pythagoras alone among men is said to have heard this music—if indeed he was not rather some good spirit and denizen of heaven, sent down perchance by the gods' behest to instruct mankind in holiness and lead them back to righteousness; at the least, he was assuredly a man endowed with a full meed of virtue, worthy to hold converse with the gods themselves, whose like he was, and to partake of the fellowship of heaven. Therefore I wonder not if the gods, who loved him well, permitted him to share the most secret mysteries of nature.

The fact that we are unable to hear this harmony seems certainly to be due to the presumption of that thief Prometheus, which brought so many evils upon men, and robbed us of that happiness which we may never again enjoy so long as we remain buried in sin and degraded by brutish desires; for how can we become sensitive to this heavenly sound while our souls are, as Persius says, bowed to the ground and lacking in every heavenly element? But if our souls were pure, chaste, and white as snow, as was Pythagoras's of old, then indeed our ears would ring and be filled with that exquisite music of the stars in their orbits; then would all things turn back to the Age of Gold, and we ourselves, free from every grief, would pass our lives in a blessed peace which even the gods might envy.

At this point time cuts me short in mid career, and luckily too, for I am afraid that by my confused and unmelodious style I have been all this while offending against that very harmony of which I speak, and have myself been an obstacle to your hearing it. And so I have done.

Translation by Phyllis B. Tillyard