Platão e Esoterismo Musical

It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the works of Plato.

Jay Kennedy, a historian and philosopher of science, described his findings as "like opening a tomb and discovering new works by Plato."

Kennedy has also found that the enigmatic "divided line" simile in the Republic, in which Plato describes a line divided by an unstated ratio, falls 61.7% of the way through the dialogue. It has been thought that the line refers to the golden mean, which expressed as a percentage is 61.8%.

The secrecy was because Plato's was "a dangerous idea", claims Kennedy. "It meant that mathematical law governed the universe and not Zeus." Given that Plato's teacher, Socrates, had been executed for sowing impiety among the youth he would have been "very cautious abut revealing doctrines that threaten the gods of Olympus".

For once, Alfred North Whitehead's description of western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato" looks like being an understatement. "We've got some 2,000 pages of Plato," says Kennedy. "We now know that underneath all of those genuine dialogues there's another layer of symbolic meaning. This is the beginning of a big debate. It will take years to make sense of all this."