The music of ancient Greece, could we hear it, would sound hopelessly foreign to us. We mostly cannot hear it; bits have been speculatively reconstructed, however, and the results do indeed make for strange listening. Unlike Greek civilization’s more enduring achievements—literature, philosophy, art, theater, architecture, politics—this music cannot really be considered Western in the typical sense. Greek music favored unison melody without accompanying chords, harmonic progressions, or counterpoint. Some tunings used quarter tones, as in Indian classical music. Even when Greek appears in Western musical vocabulary—in the names of the Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian modes, for instance, or even the word “harmony”—the terms no longer carry their ancient meanings.

Yet, as Mark Twain recognized, there is more to music than just how it sounds. However distant the practice of Greek music may be from our experience, the ideal persists. The continued presence of Greek words in musical terminology testifies to ancient music’s cultural authority. (The Greek kithara or concert lyre is the source, via Spanish, for our word guitar, though the two instruments bear little resemblance.) Ambition to revive the music of Greek drama motivated the Italian Renaissance invention of opera and inspired Wagner’s romantic syntheses of myth and spectacle. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy—the full title is The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music—identified in music the generative force behind the supposed Hellenic Dionysian spirit. Above all, Greek theories about music’s nature and effects—from Plato, Aristotle, and the Pythagoreans, among