The martial and moral values of music were appreciated by most of the early civilizations. Both Confucius and Plato believed that music was the most certain means of reforming public mores and sustaining them at a high level.[25] Although many histories on effects of music quote the scripture as evidence of the Hebrew use of music in healing, the passage quoted[63] is subject to various interpretations. It simply says that after listening to David play on the harp, Saul was “refreshed and well,” this could refer more to loss of fatigue than cure of a disease. The great poets have always sung the praises of their beloved sister muse. In Homer there is a story relating how the flow of blood from Ulysses’s wound was stopped, charmed by the use of music.[13] Now it is very possible that the blood of the famed warrior coagulated in its wound during a musical interlude, but then, all wounds except those involving a large artery will cease bleeding in about twenty minutes. Homer also stressed good music and song as a means of elevating the spirit and of overcoming depression of the soul or mind, agony, anguish, anger and sorrow. He gives as an example the story in which Chiron heals the sick with melody.[57] Cato[13] spoke of luxated joints which were eased by the harmony of sound. We cannot be sure of the diagnostic acumen of the observer, but for active people the most common traumatic joint trouble is a “locked” knee. Most knees which contain disturbed cartilage will unlock after a relatively short period of rest. In each of these instances, music was an environmental coincidence. Such observations would only begin to assume scientific medical value if they could be repeated many times under identical or similar conditions. They were not. We may now return to the episodes related by Burney in his commentary. Martianus Capella, an ancient author on music, assures us that “I have often cured disorders of the mind as well as the body with music”[58]. He also claimed that the Aesclepiades, the state-recognized priests of medicine, cured deafness by the sound of the trumpet. “Wonderful, indeed!”, says Burney, “that the same noise which would occasion deafness in some should be a specific for it in another.” In Plutarch’s book _De Musica_ it is related that Thaletas the Cretan delivered the Lacedemonians from the pestilence by the sweetness of his lyre. “Thaletas, a famous lyric poet, appeared by command of an oracle and all the songs he sang were prayers to the Gods. The disease probably reached its highest pitch of malignity before he came, and began to subside with his coming; but its disappearance was attributed to the music of Thaletas.”