Fact Check - 6. The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets
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Query: 6. The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets
Fact Check
Quoted text:
the Pythagorean proverb, “Drink five or three, not four.” Plutarch (Table Talk at 657) explained this as follows. Just as the musical ratio of 3:2 “gives a concord to the fifth, 2:1 the concord of the octave, and the concord of the fourth (which is weakest) consists in the ratio 4:3, so the musicologists of Dionysus observed three concords of wine and water, fifth, third and fourth. … ‘Five,’ indeed, is in the ratio 3:2, three parts of water being mixed with two of wine. … The mixture with a ratio of 2:3 is most harmonious, a complete inducer of sleep and relaxer of care, a ‘protecting and soothing governess,’ in Hesiod’s phrase [Works and Days 464], because it creates a profound calm and quiet among our lordly and disordered passions.” (The ratio “three” signifies “two parts of water being mixed with one of wine; and ‘four,’ three parts water per unit of wine,” an overly sober drink.) Such quasimusical philosophizing over moderation in drink indicates the desire to find objective and celestial ordering principles that could be applied to human behavior.
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