in all that pertains to the science of melody, aristoxenus was a man per se, a man who stood very much alone. As a musician, he was an avowed conservative, ever at war with any kind of innovation that he thought of as violating the ancient forms of the musical art. He speaks, for example, of two ancient styles (tropoi) which he regarded as especially beautiful, styles which his contemporaries were, in his eyes, either too ignorant to appreciate, or too avid in their pursuit of a chromatic kind of sweetness even to remember. But these ancient styles had to be preserved at any cost, as he saw it, with all their ethical distinctions intact. He seems, in fact, to have accepted the Damonian-Platonic view that these distinctions were ethical in nature, inasmuch as they appeared to have a decided effect upon the listener. The problem for Aristoxenus, as stated above, was to provide an affinity (oikeiotēs) between all the ancient styles of melody (tropoi), all the pitch ranges of the voice and instruments (tonoi), and all the scales and genera (systēmata and genē) of theory, such that modulations (metabolai) from one style, key, and genus to another could be easily effected. There was one proviso, however: such modulations would be acceptable only if they did not disturb or compromise the characteristic forms of the individual melodic modes, or tropoi.