In his personal life, for all we know, Aristoxenus may have been a charming companion, generous and open-hearted with his friends, modest among his intellectual peers, unfailingly gentle with animals and kind to children and old ladies; but this is not the persona he constructs for himself in the Elementa harmonica. He mentions earlier exponents of the science repeatedly, but always to criticise them and often to dismiss them with contempt. Their main function in his writings is to point up, by contrast, his own immeasurable superiority. His references to discussions he has had with his students or other contemporaries are invariably patronising or bad-tempered or both, and display nothing but their errors and confusions, from which, so his remarks suggest, only he is immune. He is the solitary master of the field of harmonic science, surrounded by ignorant incompetents whose existence he will acknowledge only to expose their follies. One may hope, without much confidence, that he was not really as arrogant as he seems. But a serious point emerges from his unattractive self-presentation. Very few of his withering outbursts are concerned with points of musicological detail.