Against Julian 5.5.23

Augustine reports that Julian regarded desire as more commendable because other bodily parts serve to excite it: eyes seeing in order to desire, and other members in kisses and embraces.

When drunken young men, excited also by flute music as often happens, were breaking down a chaste woman’s door, Pythagoras is said to have told the flute player to play a solemn spondaic rhythm. When she did, the slowness of the measures and gravity of the song quieted their raging insolence. [Cicero, On His Own Counsels, a lost work.]

It receives consent rather than commands.

It is excited by other stimuli, or broken and quieted by music.