Below is a list of classical music compositions which are based on or inspired by Greek or Roman mythology, religion, or philosophy.

Ludwig van Beethoven
The Creatures of Prometheus (ballet)

Hector Berlioz
The Trojans (opera: based on Virgil's Aeneid)

Francesco Cavalli
Hercules in Love (opera)

Luigi Cherubini
Medea (opéra-comique)

Claude Debussy
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (symphonic poem)

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf
Six Symphonies After Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Gabriel Fauré
Prométhée (cantata)

César Franck
Psyché (symphonic poem)

Christoph Willibald Gluck
Alceste (opera)
Iphigenia in Tauris (opera)
Orpheus and Eurydice (opera)
Paris and Helen (opera)

Reynaldo Hahn
Andromeda Resigned (poem for piano)
Eros Hidden in the Woods (poem for piano)
Ouranos (poem for piano)
Prometheus Triumphant (choral poem)

G.F. Handel
Acis and Galatea (pastoral opera)
Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus (serenata)
The Choice of Hercules (oratorio)
Hercules (oratorio)
Semele (oratorio)

Gustav Holst
The Planets (orchestral suite)

Leonardo Leo
The Marriage of Iole and Hercules (cantata)

Franz Liszt
Symphonic Poem No. 4 "Orpheus"
Symphonic Poem No. 5 “Prometheus”

Jean-Baptiste Lully
Phaëton (opera)

Felix Mendelssohn
Oedipus at Colonus (incidental music for the Sophocles play)

Wolfgang Mozart
Symphony No. 41 "Jupiter" (note: "Jupiter" is a nickname and not the title given by Mozart himself)
Apollo and Hyacinthus

Claudio Monteverdi
The Coronation of Poppaea (opera: features numerous Roman gods as well as the philosopher Seneca)
L'Orfeo (opera)
The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland (opera)

Jacques Offenbach
Daphnis et Chloé (operetta)

Carl Orff
Antigone (opera)

Henry Purcell
Dido and Aeneas (opera)

Jean-Philippe Rameau
Hippolytus and Aricia (opera)

Maurice Ravel
Daphnis et Chloé (ballet)

J.F. Rebel
Ulysses (opera)

Albert Roussel
Bacchus and Ariane (ballet)

Erik Satie
Socrates (symphonic drama)

Alexander Scriabin
Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (tone poem)

Gaspare Spontini
The Vestal Virgin (opera)

Johann Strauss II
Echoes of Rhadamantus (waltz)

Richard Strauss
Ariadne on Naxos (opera)
The Love of Danae (opera)
Daphne (opera)

Igor Stravinsky
Apollo (ballet)
Oedipus Rex (opera)

Karol Szymanowski
Myths (violin & piano)
The Fountain of Arethusa
Narcissus
Dryads and Pan

Antonio Vivaldi
Hercules in Thermodon (opera)

"Though innocent, Roman, you will pay for the sins
of your fathers until you restore
the crumbling temples and shrines of the Gods
and their smoke-blackened images.

You rule because you hold yourself inferior to the Gods.
Make this the beginning and the end of all things.
Neglect of the Gods has brought many ills
to the sorrowing land of Hesperia.

... Our generation is prolific in evil.
First it has corrupted marriage, family, and home,
and from that source disaster has flowed
over our whole land and its people.

The young girl thrills to learn the movements
of Ionian dance steps, long moulded to such arts
by obscene lusts practiced
from tenderest childhood.

... What has injurious time not diminished?
Our parents were not the men their fathers were,
and they bore children worse than themselves,
whose children will be baser still."

Horace, Odes 3.6 "Delicta maiorum"

"For a man ought to hold his ground though frightened, not because he will incur disrepute, nor through anger, nor because he does not expect to be killed or has powers by which to protect himself; for in that case he will not even think there is anything to be feared. But since all excellence implies choice ... it is clear that bravery, because it is an excellence, will make a man face what is frightening for some end, so that he does it neither through ignorance - for his excellence rather makes him judge correctly - nor for pleasure, but because the act is noble; since, if it is not noble but frantic, he does not face the danger, for that would be disgraceful."

Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1230a23-34

The Cardinal Virtues: Part One of a Multipart Series on Virtue

Virtue – or excellence – is the perfection of the nature of a thing: through virtue, every being arrives at its summit. The natural function of the virtues is to impose order onto chaos and to purify the superior of the inferior. Virtue herself is a Goddess – called Aretê in Greek and Virtus in Latin – and all of the virtues, in themselves, have their origins in the Gods.

The four cardinal virtues are Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice.

WISDOM is the perfection of the rational aspect of man. It is the power to discriminate accurately between the good and the bad. Wisdom is acquired when the soul acts alone, avoiding the confusions of embodiment.

COURAGE is the perfection of the willful aspect of man. It consists of an unwavering resistance to that which is inferior. It is the power to uphold the dictates of law and reason and to preserve through everything the correct belief about what is to be feared and what isn’t. The courageous person does not fear separation from the body.

TEMPERANCE is the perfection of the desiring aspect of man. It is the power to turn away from the inferior and to turn towards the better. The temperate person desires that which is good but does not desire that which is bad.

JUSTICE is the harmonization in man of his tripartite soul. It is in itself the activity which is proper to a being and truly belonging to it. The just person does precisely what he should do, only what he should do, only with what is his, and endeavors to maintain this proper apportionment in all his affairs and dealings.

The Scale of Virtues: Part Two of a Multipart Series on Virtue

We can divide virtue into two basic types: the slavish and the noble. The slave’s "virtues" are worth little and are mixed with vice. They are the virtues of the person who is courageous only because he doesn't want others to think him cowardly, or temperate only because he fears the consequences of intemperance. In short, he is – absurdly – virtuous because of vice. In contrast, the noble virtues are virtues per se.

Of the noble virtues, we can divide them again into the practical and the divine. The practical virtues make a person good while the sciences of divine virtue make him Godlike. As the small precedes the large, so we must become human beings first, and then Gods.

Of the practical virtues, we can divide them into the natural; the ethical (or habitual); and the civic (or social).

We can divide divine virtue into the cathartic (or purifying); the contemplative (or theoretical); the paradigmatic (or archetypal); and the priestly (or inspired).

Each class of virtue – from the natural all the way up to the priestly – relates to its neighboring classes hierarchically, and they together form a ladder, or scale, of virtues. Each successive class of virtue presupposes the prior one, such that no one can ascend the scale of virtues without first acquiring the prerequisite virtues, and no one who possesses the higher virtues can possibly lack the lower classes of virtue. For example, no one can achieve the state of cathartic virtue without already possessing the natural, habitual, and civic levels of virtue; nor can anyone possess the cathartic virtues but lack the civic.

We will look at the seven classes of the noble scale of virtues in detail in the subsequent parts of this series.

Natural Virtue: Part Three of a Multipart Series on Virtue

The lowest level of virtue on the scale of virtues is Natural Virtue.

Each virtue is possessed in some sense naturally, since everyone has a measure of wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance from birth. Individuals are more or less brave, more or less self-controlled, and so on, and it is clear that these dispositions are to some extent innate, whether they come to us by chance of birth or were acquired in a past life.

These natural virtues are the sort of virtues we share with animals. Just as it is plain to everyone that some animals have more excellent natures than other members of their species, so it is with human beings. And just as lions are courageous, cattle are temperate, and storks are just, humans are characterized by rationality, natural wisdom.

Along with disposition, natural virtue also encompasses such things as bodily vigor, natural intelligence, acute sense perception (such as good eyesight), and other things of that kind.

Therefore, we see that a naturally virtuous person is one who is by birth fair minded (just), gentle (wise), resistant to fear (courageous), not easily overwhelmed by impulse (temperate), with a sharp mind and a strong body.

But insofar as our endowments are natural, they are, for better or worse, difficult to change through training. As Aristotle wrote, a stone won’t learn to fly no matter how many times you throw it in the air. Some people are predisposed to a life of virtue, others less so. Virtue comes easier for some. That is the way of things.

But everyone, regardless of how naturally excellent they may be, is imperfect. Arrogance is not a virtue, and so we must be aware of our strengths and weaknesses. We must make the most out of what we were born with, erring neither in the direction of conceit nor bitterness.

Sovereign: Bacchus.

Other divinities of particular relevance: Vulcan.

Texts: Plato discusses them in The Laws and Statesman.

Ethical Virtue: Part Four of a Multipart Series on Virtue

Next are the ethical virtues, which are built up in us by habituation and by a sort of true opinion. They are what allow us to tame our initial, infantile state in which we are governed by the irrational and dangerous mob rule of our emotions and appetites as if by a multi-headed hydra monster. They are the virtues of well-bred children, lawful societies, and some animals. They are, approximately, what we would call “manners”, “civility,” and “good upbringing.”

Ethical virtue is that which is most visible in healthy societies – as traditions, customs, and good laws – and in families – as discipline and education –, and it habituates according to correct standards. Education is the initial acquisition of virtue by a person (typically, a child), “when the feelings of pleasure and affection, pain and hatred, that well up in his soul are channeled in the right courses before he can understand the reason why,” as Plato writes. Ethical virtue is this concord of reason and emotion. By it, we hate what we ought to hate and love what we ought to love.

This class of virtue is analogous to craft or hobby insofar as it is by practice and inculcation that the ethical virtues are acquired, given to us by tradition and authority. They are not fully rational, being more an inheritance of social or familial consensus than personal insight, but they are not altogether irrational either, since they are formed over time by collective reason and experience. With respect to natural virtue, we first receive the capacities for them and later exhibit the activities. We do not, for example, acquire good eyesight by frequent acts of seeing – we naturally have it or don’t. By contrast, we acquire habitual virtue by first engaging in the activities. We become builders by building and musicians by making music. Similarly, we become just people by doing just actions, temperate people by doing temperate actions, and courageous people by doing courageous ones.

But since the ethical virtues are not entirely rational, and are largely handed down to us by authorities, they are not fully personal virtues. We have them almost unconsciously and they are, consequently, a kind of animal virtue. This is why the ethical virtues, though good and necessary, are inferior to the higher classes of virtue which we will discuss next.

Sovereign: Bacchus

Other divinities of particular relevance: Jupiter; Minerva; Hercules; the Horai.

Texts: Plato’s Laws (especially 653a-c). Aristotle’s ethical writings deal frequently with this class of virtue. The first half of The Golden Verses of Pythagoras includes them, as does the ethical theory of the Stoics.

Civic Virtue: Part Five of a Multipart Series on Virtue

Earlier in this series, we divided virtue into two broad classes, the slavish and the noble, and we further divided the noble virtues into the practical and the divine. We went on to outline the first two kinds of practical virtue, the natural and the ethical, and we now turn to civic virtue, which is the highest level of practical virtue.

The majority of people will not ascend beyond the civic; in fact, a great many will not ascend beyond the ethical. It is with civic virtue that we begin to enter the realm of the exceptional and philosophical. But what is it that makes civic virtue exceptional? It is that, here, the individual comes to understand himself as a kingly soul sovereign over his body.

Civic virtue – also called social or political virtue – is characterized by the obedience of the body and the irrational aspects of the soul to reason, and it hinges on a key insight: that the human being is essentially a soul, that the soul is the ruler of the body and uses the body as its instrument. It is the virtue of one who lives in accordance with rationality and does not consider the body to be a part of the soul, or the soul a part of the body, or that the two together form the person, but who knows himself in the tripartition of his soul. Through civic virtue, a person initiates a return to the divine nobility of his ancestry. We no longer rely exclusively on the natural virtues gifted to us at birth nor on the inculcated virtues we might have gained from our society or family, nor even those we might have learned on our own through life experience. Rather, we begin to know ourselves as we truly are: immortal souls.

The reason we call this grade of virtue “civic” or “social” is because it involves the proper ordering of the tripartite soul in just the same sort of way that governance of a state requires the proper ordering of the analogous three primary classes of society: the productive class, the warrior class, and the ruling class. As Plato says, “[F]rom having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate and harmonious. Only then does he act.” Civic virtue operates within a sovereign mode. That is to say, its focus is downwards and outwards, providential and caring, noble and lordly; its basic orientation is hierarchical, and it seeks to put to order and to unify that which is out of order. The actions of the person with civic virtue flow out of the inward harmony he has realized.

Civic virtue thus enables us to devote ourselves to our communities, protect our cities and nations, revere our parents, love our children, and cherish our relatives. But as a consequence of its outward activity, though civic virtue is characteristically rational, it predominantly exercises its powers at the epistemic level of informed opinion rather than genuine, philosophical knowledge. It is for that reason that civic virtue lies lower on the scale of virtues and does not represent the highest possible ascension.

We can now consider what each of the four classical virtues look like at the civic level. One must direct all thoughts and actions by the standard of reason, and wish for or do nothing but what is right, and have regard for human affairs as one would for divine authority. This is civic wisdom. One must exalt his mind above all dread of danger, fear nothing except disgrace, and bear both adversity and prosperity. This is civic courage. One must strive after nothing that is base, in no instance overstepping the bounds of moderation but subduing all immodest desires beneath the yoke of reason. This is civic temperance. One must safeguard for each man that which belongs to him. This is civic justice.

In civic wisdom we find reason, understanding, prudence, foresight, willingness to learn, and caution. Courage endows us with magnanimity, confidence, composure, nobleness, constancy, endurance, and steadfastness. Temperance gives to us modesty, discipline, focus, dignity, and patience. From justice comes piety, uprightness, friendship, harmony, a sense of duty, love, and empathy.

Sovereign: Jupiter

Other divinities of particular relevance: Hercules, Apollo, Athena, the Horai.

Texts: Plato’s Republic (especially 427e-445b), Alcibiades I, and Gorgias. Much of Aristotle’s ethical writings. The first half of The Golden Verses of Pythagoras. The bulk of the Stoic writings.

How each man weaves
his web will bring him to glory or to grief.
King Jupiter is the king to all alike.
The Fates will find the way.

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 10

"And what advantage does a wrestler gain from his training partner? The greatest. And that man, too, who insults me becomes my training partner; he trains me in patience, in abstaining from anger, in remaining gentle. ... And yet you say that if someone trains me in abstaining from anger, he brings me no benefit? It is simply that you don't know how to draw advantage from other people. My neighbor is a bad man? Bad to himself, but good to me. This is the magic wand of Hermes: 'Touch what you want,' so the saying goes, 'and it will turn to gold.' No, but bring me whatever you wish, and I'll turn it into something good. Bring illness, bring death, bring destitution, bring abuse or a trial for one's life, and under the touch of the magic wand of Hermes, all of that will become a source of benefit."

Epictetus, Discourses 3.20

"Lead me, Master of the soaring vault
Of Heaven, lead me, Father, where you will.
I stand here prompt and eager to obey.
And ev'n suppose I were unwilling, still
I should attend you and know suffering,
Dishonorably and grumbling, when I might
Have done so and been good as well. For Fate
The willing leads, the unwilling drags along."

Cleanthes, quoted by Seneca Letter 107

Or have you ever grasped [the Just itself, Beauty, or the Good] with any of your bodily senses? I am speaking of all things such as Bigness, Health, Strength and, in a word, the reality of all other things, that which each of them essentially is. Is what is most true in them contemplated through the body, or is this the position: whoever of us prepares himself best and most accurately to grasp that thing itself which he is investigating will come closest to the knowledge of it? Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and, in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach reality, Simmias, if anyone does?

Plato, Phaedo 65d-66a

"This, in turn, is to be able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do. ... God knows whether this is the right name for those who can do this correctly or not, but so far I have always called them 'dialecticians.'"

Plato, Phaedrus 265e-266c

"That day I had a better opportunity to watch Socrates than I ever had at Potidaea, for, being on horseback, I wasn't in very great danger. Well, it was easy to see that he was remarkably more collected than Laches. But when I looked again I couldn't get your words, Aristophanes, out of my mind: in the midst of battle he was making his way exactly as he does around town,

...with swagg'ring gait and roving eye.

He was observing everything calmly, looking out for friendly troops and keeping an eye on the enemy. Even from a great distance it was obvious that this was a very brave man, who would put up a terrific fight if anyone approached him. This is what saved both of them. For, as a rule, you try to put as much distance as you can between yourself and such men in battle; you go after the others, those who run away helter-skelter."

Plato, Symposium 221b-c

"Since there must be continuous motion in the world of things, and this is a single motion, and a single motion must be a motion of magnitude (for that which is without magnitude cannot be in motion), and of a single magnitude moved by a single mover (for otherwise there will not be continuous motion but a consecutive series of separate motions) , then if the mover is a single thing, it is either in motion or unmoved: if, then it is motion, it will have to keep pace with that which it moves and itself be in process of change, and it will also have to be moved by something: so we have a series that must come to an end, and a point will be reached at which motion is imparted by something that is unmoved. ... Now that these points are settled, it is clear that the first unmoved mover cannot have any magnitude. For if it has magnitude, this must be either a finite or an infinite magnitude. Now we have already proved in our course on physics that there cannot be an infinite magnitude; and we have now proved that it is impossible for a finite magnitude to have an infinite force, and also that it is impossible for a thing to be moved by a finite magnitude during an infinite time. But the first mover causes a motion that is eternal and causes it during an infinite time. It is clear, therefore, that it is indivisible and is without parts and without magnitude."

Aristotle, Physics 267a21-b25

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, one of the greatest emperors of Rome, was born 1,903 years ago today. Hail!

"The man who lives with the Gods is the one whose soul is constantly on display to them as content with its lot and obedient to the will of the guardian spirit, the fragment of himself that Zeus has granted every person to act as his custodian and command center. And in each of us this is mind and reason." Meditations 5.27

An article worth reading by the Romanist Society:

https://nistsocietytheroma.substack.com/p/on-romanist-prayer