Crossword-Solution: AULOS 5 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 5

The flute or aulos does not seem to have been used in connection with the cithara at all, and the Greeks had nothing corresponding to what we call an orchestra.

The aulos was appropriate to certain religious services and to certain festivals, and it had a moderate status in the various contests of the national games, but the great instrument of Greek music, the universal dependence for all occasions, public and private, was the lyre.

Streamers hung lazily aloft from masts and yards, prows and sterns, whilst flutes and lyres, syrinx and clarionet, kithra and aulos sent forth the soft Ionian music until the shores were wrapt in softest harmony.

This conclusion is supported by allusions in Aristophanes and in Plato's _Crito_, which undoubtedly refer to the drone: "This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears like the sound of the flute (_aulos_) in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears."[27] Aristophanes, in his play _The Acharnians_, indulges in a flight of satire at the expense of the musical Boeotians, by making a band of Theban pipers play a Boeotian merchant and his slave into town.

The verb used here for "blowing" is [Greek: phusan], the very word applied to blowing or inflating the bellows ([Greek: phusa]), and not the usual verb [Greek: aulein], to play the aulos.