ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the soundscape of ancient Greek healing practices of the fifth through third centuries bce, asking how healers and physicians encountered sound and incorporated it into their treatments. Many philosophical and medical authors throughout antiquity conceptualized health as a type of harmony and cast the balance of the body as a type of musical consonance. Yet, although these physicians translated corporeal sonics into the languages of mathematics and poetic metre, they seldom prescribed sound-cures to reinstate any musical order. Instead, they shunned practices that might resemble this and displayed anxiety towards such sonic treatments as paeans, chants and spells, which healing cults and rustic medicine incorporated. This chapter thus explores the sonics of competing medical traditions and compiles a rough soundtrack of health and healing in the ancient Greek world.
