The most famous ancient Greek healing sanctuary, at Epidauros, was located away from the polis, amidst the natural world. Healing was closely bound up with the natural landscape and its elements: patients slept on the earth in rituals of sacred sleep, water was used for purification, and fires burned in sacrificial rites before and after healing. 

The element of air was however also significant, particularly as it related to sound. Rituals of musical performance were an essential aspect of the healing sanctuaries, so that the landscape resounded with music as a daily occurrence. In particular, sanctuaries made use of the paean (paián), a type of circular song-dance associated with Apollo, god of musical harmony and healing, and father of Asclepius, the healing god of the sanctuary at Epidauros. In the ancient Greek context, music was an expression of the underlying patterns of nature and the cosmos. The paean was associated with springtime and renewal, while there was a firm association in the ancient Greek imagination between circular, choral dancing and the dance of the heavenly bodies.  

The use of music and dance at sanctuaries such as that at Epidauros therefore points to an understanding of healing based on conceptions of harmony that were holistic in so much as they not only healed both body and soul, but situated the patient within broader divine and cosmic patterns by which healing could be effected.