What music sounded like in Ancient Greece?

Idea / Music Can we know what music sounded like in Ancient Greece? Armand D’Angour – From the archive

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed;I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

This epigram by Callimachus, in a moving translation by the Victorian poet William Johnson Cory, speaks of the timeless survival of Heraclitus’ songs. Ironically, the poem is the only evidence of their existence: the poet’s ‘pleasant voices’ must remain unsung. Most classical poetry, spanning around four centuries from the songs of Homer in the 8th century BCE to those ­of Aristophanes in the 4th century BCE, was in fact composed to be sung to the accompaniment of musical instruments such as the lyre an