The possibility of discovering what ancient Greek music sounded like may seem a remote one; but owing to the particular and unique qualities of the Greek mind we can gain a remarkable amount of information both from surviving writings and from illustrations on ancient vases and in wall-paintings.

The Greeks were very interested in music, and in the effects it could have on the human mind, both emotional and moral; Plato was deeply concerned that the young, in the course of their education, should be exposed only to the ‘right kind’ of music. This was more important in the Classical world because most of the music was vocal, to be sung with instrumental accompaniment. Whereas we think of poetry and drama in terms of the spoken word, in the Greek tradition, there was, more often than not, a musical element involved. On the intellectual side, the ‘message’ was closely bound up with the musical style, while the rhythms of the words and their rises and falls in pitch were closely related to the melodic line; so Plato was justified in believing that words and music, particularly in combination, could exert an influence on the hearer, either for good or evil. Most of the purely instrumental music was played, not as music in its own right, but as an accompaniment to dancing.

A number of instruments were used; the most popular, and the most important, was a woodwind instrument - a pair of pipes played together (probably in unison most of the time), with double reeds like those of a modern oboe or bassoon; it was called an aulos. The ‘concert’ stringed instrument with seven strings, played by professionals who usually accompanied their own singing, was called the kithara; it had a fairly large wooden soundbox. The smaller version used by amateurs, the lyre, had a tortoiseshell body. These are all copiously illustrated in vase-paintings, and it is possible to see how they were constructed and, to a certain extent, how they were played.

A number of ancient Greek treatises survive on the subject of music; the most important of them is by Aristoxenos (4th century B.C.), and he tells us quite a lot about the development of Greek music, the construction of scales, and the various intonations which were used. This information can be linked with another remarkable discovery, possibly made by the philosopher Pythagoras. He found that if a vibrating length of string was halved, without altering its tension, the pitch of the note it gave would rise by an octave; so the ratio of the octave, as he put it was 2:1. His followers went on to find the ratios for other intervals, down to very small intervals such as the 1/3 tone and the 1/4 tone, which they used a lot, but which are not heard nowadays, at least in the more conventional pieces of modern music. As a result it is possible for us to re-create the exact intonations of the ancient music, and hear what they sounded like.

Some of the ancient ‘musicologists’ (as they can justly be called) give details of two systems of written notation for the music. I have now interpreted the older one as a notation designed especially for players of the aulos, the symbols providing a fingering-guide for the player, to help him to play the appropriate notes. (See J.G. Landels, Music in Ancient Greece and Rome, chs. 2(a), 9 and Appendix 3). The later system is alphabetical, but differs from ours in that the whole alphabet is used, and the notes run downwards instead of upwards.