It's the Ancient's on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and today's podcast

I've got a real treat for you because I'm joined by James Lloyd from the University

of Reading to talk all about ancient Greek music. We're going to be talking about the significance

of music for the ancient Greeks. We're going to be looking into the chorus. We're going

to be looking into certain ancient Greek instruments such as the Aoulos. James is going

to be playing an instrument. This is a first for the ancient's. We've got actual music

on the podcast. This was so much fun to record. James is a fantastic speaker and you are

going to absolutely love this one. Here's James.

James, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. It's great to join you.

Now ancient Greek music, this seems like an often forgotten or overlooked part of ancient

Greek history, but a part that was vitally important. Yeah, definitely. I think it's

easy to forget how important all-present music was in a society before recordings and

how much of a community experience it was. Today we can go walking to the shops and listening

to whatever we want to on Spotify or whatever streaming service there is. Again, we can

sit down in the evening, put on CDs and tapes if you're at that age or streaming again,

etc., etc. But in antiquity, you actually needed a musician there in order to experience

the musician and that meant that a lot of people knew how to sing, a lot of people knew

how to play instruments. In Athens, there were yearly choruses and there were about 1,000

to 2,000 of the citizens each year who would take part in the citizen performances. It

was a huge thing in terms of the amount of people who did music. It was massive festivals

at dinners, sometimes in funerals, at parties, in religious ceremonies, kind of any conceivable

situation there would be music being performed with a few caveats, of course, but yeah, it

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