[xaritas]

This is music to accompany spoken poetry, so the it's not necessarily comparable to opera or pop music, where the voice is used as an instrument. In Greek lyric poetry the syllables are arranged according to fairly strict rules; having scanned (that is, marked up for meter) lots of Greek poetry, I don't doubt that this is an accurate way to get the rhythm of the piece. However, while I have no background in music theory, the claim that rhythm is the most important aspect to recovering the original sound doesn't seem right to me—I would assume that the tonality and harmonics are harder to create with certitude.

Links of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_trimeter and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochaic_tetrameter

Interesting facts about ancient Greek: in contrast to English poetry, stress is indicated by the length of the vowel, rather than how forcefully it is pronounced; and vowels are accented by rising or falling pitch rather than stress. My professors said that ancient Greek probably sounded more like Chinese (which I gather follows similar rules) than a modern western language.