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Unlike English, Ancient (e.g. Attic) Greek does not reorder words to formulate a question. The particle "ἆρα" does modify a statement into a question, but is not always present. In that case, I presume there would have been a way for native speakers to hear the difference, perhaps in a change in overall intonation.

What device did spoken Ancient Greek employ to signal a question when the particle ἆρα was not used?

Since there are no native speakers of Ancient Greek around, I imagine having a definite answer to this question is impossible. In that case I would be happy with an educated guess, or a pointer towards current scholarly debate.

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I know very little about Attic Greek, but note that, if questions were marked intonationally, the intonation may not have been rising. While rising intonation for questions is a tendency across languages, it is not a universal. See this section of the Wiki article on intonation as well as my answer to another question about question intonation. – musicallinguist Sep 26 '12 at 13:36
Since there are no native speakers around anymore, what evidence would there be of intonation? I don't know of any scripts that denote it, for instance. If everybody who had writing at the same time as the ancient greeks and who knew about the ancient greeks also had the same intonation, I doubt they would have bothered to record that fact. Treatises on dialect, perhaps. – kaleissin Sep 27 '12 at 6:19
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@kaleissin It's not likely, yes but who knows... Besides this is a greatly interesting question for someone that loves Greek like me eheh :) By the way, if someone (with reference) wants to answer "Nothing is available to say that at the moment", that is still an answer. :) – Alenanno♦ Sep 27 '12 at 8:19

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As you say, reconstructing the sound of a language for which there are no longer any speakers can be very difficult, so it's unlikely that there is a definite answer to your question. However, you might start with A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, The Prosody of Greek Speech (Oxford, 1994). The authors use evidence from cross-linguistic studies to build a theory of prosody, and then apply that theory to classical Greek texts. It has a section on questions, and even if that doesn't help to answer your question, it also has a really good bibliography which might help you to track down more information.

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