As I sit writing at my desk, an aeroplane roars through the sky, drowning out all quieter sounds. When its boom recedes, I hear the growl of cars outside, a bird singing in the garden, and dogs barking occasionally in the distance. Inside, it’s quiet enough to hear the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece – until a loud ring of the doorbell intrudes. From a downstairs room the muffled voices on a radio or television slip into the mix, along with an intermittent drone of a vacuum cleaner and washing machine. Venturing outside, I hear the hubbub of voices in a crowd, the shouting and laughter of children playing, the rattle of drills for roadwork engineering, and the patter of rain on leaves and pavement. In the supermarket, trolleys trundle, tills ring, and piped music gives off a thin tune with an insistent beat.

We are used to hearing such everyday, uninvited, domestic and outdoor noises in addition to those we may choose to receive and attend to – organised sounds such as music, whether heard live or through earphones, and a host of electronically transmitted voices such as those on televised news or podcasts. One of the features of modern auditory experience is its sheer ubiquity: we are const­antly exposed to a barrage of sound, whether in the form of background music that accompanies the mundane activities of daily life, or in the selected sound­tracks made available by the unprecedented access to broadcast and recorded sound on a wide variety of media.

If this is the soundscape of today’s world, what was that of the past? If one thinks of everyday life in ancient Athens of the fifth century BC, for instance, many of the above-mentioned sounds would have been unknown. The excessively loud noises produced by machines since the Industrial Revolution – the din of automotive engines and pneumatic drills, assembly-line manufacture and iron-frame building construction, and of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’ – were explored in Humphrey Jennings’ 1985 classic Pandemonium. However, other sounds would have been familiar enough to ancients, in particular those of nature. Greek preserves a host of words for animal sounds – dogs barking, sheep bleating, donkeys braying, frogs croaking (the comic playwright Aristophanes represents this with brekekekex koax koax) – and for a varied array of birdsong. Perhaps the loudest natural sounds ancient ears would experience would have been the terrifying blast of a thunderbolt or the roar of earthquakes and volcanoes (the poet Pindar speaks of Etna’s eruption as the roaring of the hundred-headed giant Typhon).

At the beginning of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates and his young friend are strolling by the banks of the Ilissus river outside the walls of the bustling city centre. They have left behind the agora of Athens, where the shouting of shoppers, hawkers, and itinerant speakers might be comparable to those heard in a market town today. Plato conjures up the rippling of the stream ruffled by gentle breezes, and has Socrates commend the beauty of the place that ‘echoes with the penetrating summer song of the cicada chorus’ – idyllic enough, though travel­lers to Greece will know what a huge volume of sound those small creatures can produce. Socrates would have known of a less enticing din, since his father was a stonemason, possibly the owner of a marble workshop or factory. There, teams of workers would have sawn, hacked, and carved blocks of marble for use in sculptures, reliefs, and temples. The largest workshop of which we know was a shield factory owned by the orator Lysias; given the constant warfare in the period, arms were a lucrative business.

In Athens’ industrial and artisanal areas, the noise of iron armour being beaten would have mingled with that of blacksmiths at their forges, tanners cutting and beating leather, and cutlers making metal implements. Had Socrates and Phaedrus strolled through the Ceramicus (the potters’ quarter), their ears would have been assailed by the whirring of potters’ wheels and the clink of fired earthenware being loaded onto mule-drawn carts before these clattered away to take their contents to be sold in the agora and loaded for export from the Piraeus. The construction of the Parthenon from the 440s onward meant yet more bustle and noise: Plutarch speaks of the intense work required, including that of ‘carpenters, moulders, bronze-smiths, stone-cutters, dyers, craftsmen in gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, embossers, rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders, and miners’. Financial accounts survive, carved on stone, showing that enormous amounts were spent simply on transporting materials. The army of artisans and transport vehicles can have been no less noisy than the clanking of an actual army of men in hoplite (heavy-armed) array, on the march (or at sail) to distant campaigns around Greece in support of Athens’ imperial designs.

At the port of Piraeus itself huge ship-sheds have been recently excavated, in which Athens’ warships, its vaunted fleet of triremes, were built and launched. In an extravagant metaphor, Aristophanes talks of how a poet ‘rounds out his forms, refines them on the lathe, welds them together, and hammers out sent­ences and phrases’; the din of these kinds of activities might better apply to wood being sawn, hewn, and lathed, the creaking of timbers, ropes and sails, and the screeching and rattling of completed ships sliding down the slipways into the sea. There, three banks of rowers on the triremes would wield their oars in time to the penetrating sound of the double-pipe (aulos), a sound whose power and sinuous beauty can be heard from the playing of pipes reconstructed from archaeological remains.

The aulos was also the instrument that accompanied the male singer-dancers who constituted the chorus (15 for tragedy, 24 for comedy) in the ancient theatre. This was a period of notable musical experimentation, and Athenian ears were being assailed by new and popular musical sounds (the softer stringed lyre was only suitable for indoor performance). In 446 BC, Athens’ leading citizen Pericles inaugurated the world’s first purpose-built concert hall, the Odeion. Audiences were exposed to lavish musical innovations of a kind that tradition­alists like Plato found so alarming that he would have banned from his ideal state both the new forms of music and the aulos itself. For him, music was becoming the domain of the ‘theatre mob’, who cheered on the excesses of avant-garde performers (the pop stars of the day) where previously he felt that music had preserved due dignity and order. Before religious ceremonies, however, even those that might have involved music and song, Greeks were regularly enjoined to ‘preserve holy silence’. For many, then as now, a true sense of the sacred might best be invoked and expressed not by any kind of noise, but by its absence.