 In Book II of his Dodecachordon (1547), the humanist Heinrich Glarean (also known as Glareanus) (1488–1563) argues that composers of polyphonic music are inferior to those who set a single melodic line to a text. He speculates that the latter was the way Greeks, Romans, and early Christian communities composed music. Monody is superior on the grounds that it requires an exercise in invention, whereas the polyphonist merely borrows a melodic line and then carries out a task that is predominantly intellectual. According to Glareanus, monody has a natural character and an expressive immediacy that is lost in subsequent development. Less than half a century later, both the reference to a classical model and the vindication of monody became crucially important in Italian musical thinking and practice. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, a group of Florentine intellectuals and musicians gathered around the figure of Giovanni de’ Bardi, a nobleman and amateur musician. This group is normally referred to as the Florentine Camerata, or Camerata de’ Bardi. Its goal was to recover the expressive potential of music, as described in ancient Greek and Roman sources. Music’s power to arouse emotions was thought to have been lost during the Middle Ages, as polyphony developed. The envisaged solution was a return to monody, and more precisely to a melodic line that would follow and emphasize the prosodic features of impassioned speech (Palisca 2006: chapter 7; Palisca 1989 is an influential collection of source readings). Thus, the main goal of the Camerata seems to have been expression, to be intended here as the arousal of emotion, while the imitation of speech prosody was considered a means to that end. This is philosophically significant in that it indicates a revival of the classical Greek idea that music is expressive in virtue of its resemblance to the way human beings express their emotions (see  §1.3).