Abstract

The ancient Greeks were obsessed with the stability of various parts of their world: the ultimate stability of the cosmos, the stability of virtue and the stability of health. They postulated a number of mechanisms which were meant to explain how stability was to be achieved or maintained at the various levels of the cosmos. One such explanatory mechanism was that the underlying structure of phenomena--the proportionate blending or regulation of their parts--accounted for their dynamic or static equilibrium. ;In this thesis two different kinds of proportion that were common in ancient explanations of phenomena are examined: isonomic proportion and harmonic proportion. Isonomic proportion , which was most commonly used in theories which made use of physical opposites, described and helped maintain the stability between opposites of equal strength or quantity. ;Harmonic or musical proportion , was used primarily in theories which made use of opposites that were not equal to one another . The opposites in this sort of union were brought together in such a way that one in the pair was preponderant, or one was clearly conceived as the ruler over the other. In such a relationship, there was no obvious mechanism internal to the harmonic structure that could account for the desired stability. ;It is argued that the Greeks relied on the belief of the inherent stability of number to account for the stability of harmonic structures. After background analyses of both the types of opposites employed in Greek natural philosophy as well as how value was connected to polarity, and the importance and influence of Pythagorean conceptions of number and musical proportion, there is an in depth consideration of the use of both isonomic and harmonic ratios in Greek theories of the body, the soul and the cosmos. In the final section the question of stability is directly treated. There both dynamic and static unions, the supposed inherent stability of numerical ratios, and the Greeks' use of analogy and presupposition to account for and safeguard the stability of their world are considered