 Aristides Quintilianus (3rd–4th century CE), an author known uniquely for his treatise De Musica, also attempts a fusion of Aristoxenian and Pythagorean elements. While his view of harmonics is indebted to Aristoxenus, his philosophy of music bears a strong Pythagorean influence. Book III of his De Musica illustrates parallels between musical elements and the most disparate parts of reality, from the senses, to virtues, all the way to celestial bodies. Aristides Quintilianus defends the ethical value of music, and in doing so he explicitly refers to Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on the issue. He argues that music imitates moral actions in a way that is superior to that of the other arts, because it achieves mimesis in more than one way, that is, through words and melodic movement (De Musica, book II, chapter 4). Aristides Quintilianus also classifies musical elements, from modes to instruments, as masculine, feminine, or a mixture of the two (modes are scales that divide up the octave in different sequences of tones and semitones; though the names of Greek modes are identical to the later Church modes, they name different scales). This classification is supposed to help in determining the ethos of musical pieces and instruments, feminine elements being associated with smoothness, and masculine ones with roughness (De Musica, book II, chapter 12).