Ancient musical and literary theory converge in a view about the ways in which aural effects are produced and received. According to both, sounds are constructed around gaps of sound. This is the source of their music and the pleasure they promise and then deliver—in the form of an appearance (a phantasia) that exists in the imagination rather than in the ear. Sounds that cannot be heard are truly sublime sounds. The chapter explores the genesis of this view of music, poetry, and the music of poetry in Cicero, the Hellenistic euphonist critics, and Longinus, with glances back at earlier stages of the same tradition (Aristoxenus, the fifth-century harmonikoi, and Gorgias), which in fact lies at the root of all song-culture in Greco-Roman antiquity. [https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198794462.001.0001/oso-9780198794462-chapter-10]