Musica e politica : riflessioni su una feconda relazione divenuta adulterina

Arthur Lovejoy founded the history of ideas with the explicit intention of breaking disciplinary boundaries. The exasperated specialization imposed by the contempo-rary academic system sometimes prevents us from seeing links and relationships be-tween ideas and activities that are essential for understanding the functioning of past societies. This article shows how having rigidly separated domains such as political science, economics, music, gymnastics, the military arts, and theology, and having created specialists who have little or no dialogue with each other, is an impediment to understanding cultures in which these domains were closely interrelated. In par-ticular, we intend to highlight the strong link between music and politics, since it is at the origin of the nomocracy and democracy that we inherited from ancient Greek civilization.