Music of ancient Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  Music of ancient Greece was present at virtually every moment that mattered: weddings, funerals, athletic contests, divine sacrifices, and the earliest stirrings of theatre. The word music itself comes from the Muses, daughters of Zeus and patron goddesses of all creative and intellectual life. That etymology alone tells you something about how seriously the Greeks took their art.

  Yet for all its centrality, the actual sound of Greek music remains elusive. Fragments of notation survive, scattered across papyrus and stone. Ceramics show musicians mid-performance. Philosophers argued at length about which scales were morally acceptable. What we cannot do is simply press play. The questions that follow are therefore not merely historical. They are archaeological: what did this music sound like, who made it, what did it mean to hear it, and why did Plato fear the wrong kind of it?

• 2. Music in Society and Ritual

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  Pericles' teacher Damon stated, as recorded by Plato in the Republic, that when the fundamental modes of music change, the fundamental modes of the state change with them. That was not hyperbole. Music and gymnastics together comprised the main divisions of formal schooling, and one ancient source said the word "music" expressed the entire education.

  The sarcophagus of Hagia Triada shows the aulos present at sacrifices as early as 1300 BC. At religious ceremonies, before and after drinking parties called symposia, libations were poured to the Olympic gods, the heroes, and Zeus. These offerings were accompanied by a special melody called the spondeion, played on the aulos. The libation ritual and its dedicated melody were inseparable.

  On the battlefield, specific trumpet notes carried commands to soldiers. The aulos and percussion instruments helped oarsmen keep stroke in unison while a boatswain called out orders. The expression for "making music" and "prophesying" were, in ancient Greek, identical words, because music was considered capable of inducing prophets into the ecstatic state needed for revelation.

  A popular piece type at drinking parties was the skolion, a song composed specifically for that setting. The particular social role of a piece shaped not just its form but also its name, and those names survived the instruments themselves.

• 3. Song Forms and Drama

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  Hymns are the earliest formal type in Greek music and survive in relatively large numbers. They address a god, directly or indirectly, and were followed in processional form by the prosodion, sung on the road to an altar or shrine.

  Paeans were most commonly sung in honor of Apollo and Athena, expressing hope for deliverance from peril or thanksgiving after victory. The hyporchema was a dance-song closely associated with the paean, and the overlap was close enough that the First Delphic Hymn carries the double title "Paean or Hyporchema".

  Dithyrambs were merrily sung at festivals in dedication to Dionysus, the god of wine. Choirs of men and boys, accompanied by an aulos player, performed them. In his Poetics, Aristotle traced the origins of tragic drama directly to the dithyramb. The leaders of the dithyrambic choir, who led both the song and the dance, stood apart from the responding group. Aristotle argued this single-versus-group relationship was the seed from which drama grew, with one actor eventually playing all parts through song and speech while the choros narrated through dance.

  In ancient Greece, the playwright was expected to write the script, compose the music, and choreograph the movement. Lyric poetry, by definition accompanied by the lyre, eventually split into monodic performance by a single singer and choral lyric danced and sung by a group. Alkaios and Sappho, both from the island of Lesbos, were among the most celebrated lyric poets, and Sappho is one of the few women whose poetry has been preserved.

• 4. Instruments and Their Origins

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  According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the lyre was invented when Hermes, after stealing Apollo's sacred cattle, fashioned an instrument from a tortoise shell, added horns and gut strings, and played it to appease his brother. Apollo was so taken with the sound that he accepted the lyre as payment for the stolen cattle. A separate account has Hermes giving the lyre to Amphion, a son of Zeus, who then used its music to move stones into place and build the walls of Thebes.

  The aulos, usually played as a double pipe with two double reeds like an oboe, traced its origins to Athena, who invented it to reproduce the lamentation of Medusa's sisters after Perseus beheaded Medusa. The writer Telestes, working in the 5th century, described Athena finding the instrument in a thicket. Plutarch adds that Athena threw the aulos away after seeing her reflection, because playing it distorted her face. The satyr Marsyas picked it up, and his fate was not pleasant.

  The Pan flute, or syrinx, entered the world through a different kind of loss. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, the water nymph Syrinx fled from Pan to a river she could not cross. She prayed to be transformed, and her nymph sisters turned her into a bundle of reeds. Pan fashioned those reeds into the instrument that bears her name.

  The cithara was the professional version of the lyre, built with a box-type frame and strings tunable by wooden wedges along a crossbar. Aristotle in the Politics called it an "organon technikon", meaning an artist's instrument requiring training. The barbiton was a larger, bass version with eastern Ionian origins; it was the primary instrument of Sappho. The kanonaki, a trapezoidal psaltery invented by the Pythagoreans in the 6th century BC, was played on the player's thighs and plucked with bone picks. The hydraulis, forerunner of the modern pipe organ, used water to maintain constant air pressure to its pipes; two detailed descriptions survive, one from Vitruvius and one from Heron of Alexandria.

• 5. Philosophy and the Ethics of Sound

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  Pythagoras believed music was subject to the same mathematical laws as the mechanics of the cosmos. He called this the music of the spheres. After studying the sounds hammers made at a blacksmith's forge, Pythagoras invented the monochord, a single string stretched over a sounding board with a movable bridge. Using it, he mapped the relationship between string length and vibration. The Pythagoreans then developed tuning systems built on simple integers and ratios, and it can be demonstrated that all surviving music written in ancient instrumental notation can be played using these pure intervals.

  Aristoxenus took a different approach. He believed musical intervals should be judged by ear as well as described in mathematical terms. He wrote multiple musicological treatises and was influenced by Pythagoras while also insisting on the role of the listener's perception. Music written in vocal notation goes further still, moving beyond the strict limits of harmonics.

  Plato's anxiety about music ran deep. He recorded an extended complaint that ancient music had once been divided into proper, established forms, with disobedience penalized by informed judgment. Then, he wrote, poets with natural talent but ignorance of the laws of music led an unmusical anarchy. Their works infected the masses with the belief that music had no right or wrong, and the theatres, once silent, grew vocal. Plato called the result a "pernicious theatrocracy".

  The Greek mode system gave specific emotional and moral character to each scale. Dorian modes were described as harsh; Phrygian modes as sensual. Plato discussed the proper use of several modes, including the Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian, in the Republic. This system of ethos meant that choosing a scale was also choosing a moral posture. The names of those modes passed into Roman music and then into medieval European music, where references to the Lydian church mode persisted, though by then the original sound and character had been lost entirely.

• 6. Orpheus, Marsyas, and Mythic Sound

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  Orpheus was said to be the son of Apollo, or of the Muse Calliope, or of mortal parents, depending on the source. His teacher was Linus, who by some accounts was the first person ever gifted with the ability to sing by the Muses, and who passed that gift to Orpheus. Apollo then gave Orpheus a golden lyre.

  According to the Argonautica, Orpheus sailed with Jason and the Argonauts and played music more beautiful and louder than the bewitching sirens, allowing the crew to pass safely. When Orpheus' wife Eurydice died, he played a lament so mournful that the gods and all the nymphs wept. He descended to the underworld and with music alone softened the heart of Hades, who permitted him to leave with Eurydice on one condition: he must not look at her until they had fully returned. He looked. She vanished forever.

  Marsyas the Phrygian satyr boasted of his skill on the aulos and challenged Apollo to a contest. The stakes, according to Pseudo-Apollodorus in Bibliotheca, were that the victor could do whatever they wanted to the loser. The Muses judged the first round a draw. In one version, Apollo then played his lyre upside down, which Marsyas could not replicate with the aulos. In another, Apollo sang, which Marsyas could not do. In a third, Marsyas simply played out of tune and conceded. In every version, Apollo flayed Marsyas alive. The myth made plain what the Greeks believed about the consequences of challenging divine musical authority.

• 7. What Survived

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  Greek music was primarily monophonic: single melodies built on a system of modes, with notes placed between consonant intervals. Plato noted that Greek musicians sometimes played more than one note simultaneously, though this was considered an advanced technique. The Orestes fragment by Euripides appears to call for multiple simultaneous pitches. Current scholarship, including work on cuneiform music scripts from the ancient Mediterranean, argues that simultaneous pitch was recognized theoretically many centuries before the Greeks developed written notation.

  The surviving pieces span several periods. From the Classical period: a trumpet signal, fragments connected to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and material from Euripides including Papyrus Vienna G 2315 for the Orestes and Papyrus Leiden inv. P. 510 for the Iphigenia in Aulis. The Hellenistic period produced a cluster of Vienna and Berlin papyri, the Epidaurus hymn to Asclepius, and citharodic nome fragments. From the Roman imperial period come the Delphic Hymns, the Seikilos epitaph, and the Hymns of Mesomedes.

  The lyre, cithara, aulos, barbiton, hydraulis, and salpinx all passed into Roman music. The scale names the Greeks assigned, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, traveled even further. The Seikilos epitaph, a complete song inscribed on stone, remains the oldest fully notated piece of music in existence, and it carries its own engraved dedication.