The miracles of Aesculapius / by Warwick Wroth.

Warwick William Wroth

Date:: [1884?]

Credit: The miracles of Aesculapius / by Warwick Wroth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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of acsculapius. Wroth. les' play the Plutus, an rorthy named Chremy- :he good fortune to cap- blind God of Riches. Chremylus”being a poor but deserving man, ventures to entertain a hope that the god would distribute his favours more equally, if only his eyesight could be restored. It was in Athens, and in the age of Hippo- crates ; but Chremylus scorns to consult a regular physician, and, after making some satirical remarks on the medical profession and its emoluments, decides that he cannot do better than take his blind divinity and lay him on a bed in the temple of Aesculapius. To the Athenian temple of AEsculapius Plutus is ac- cordingly taken. And here, when it has grown dark, and the lamp has gone out in the sanctu- ary of the god, a strange scene presents itself. All around are the recumbent forms of men and women, afflicted with various diseases ; each one awaiting the midnight Vision of Healing which the God of Medicine is to send. The malady of Plutus is shared by at least one other patient in this bizarre assembly, by a certain politician named Neoclides, who is blind, but who, we are told, outdoes in stealing even those who can see. When all is quiet, the priest of the temple comes in, and goes from altar to altar collecting the figs and cakes which have been offered by the faithful—offerings which he proceeds to consecrate by depositing in a sack for his own eating. Last of all appears the God of Medicine himself; and he, after going the round of his patients, and making a gum and vinegar plaster for Neoclides, restores the eyesight of Plutus. This is not a scene in Cloud Cuckoo- Town, but (due allowance being made for caricature) one from actual Athenian life in the fourth century before our era. That the ancient Greek slept in the temples of /Escu- lapius in order to obtain a cure is wrell known to us from several sources, and, in fact, the remains of the Athenian temple itself have been discovered in our own day on the southern slope of the Acropolis. On this spot the spade of the excavator has brought 3 to light not only the temple and its adjoining buildings, but also some of the objects once actually offered to the god by grateful patients —votive tablets, for instance, on which may still be seen depicted processions of men, women, and children approaching to the God of Healing and his family. Even documents of the temple, such as the in- ventories of the votive offerings, have been unearthed. From these we may learn how the blind man dedicated a model—some- times in gold or silver—of an eye; the lame man, the model of a leg; and the long list of votive ears and mouths and noses and fingers furnishes an index, only too complete, to all the ills which flesh is heir to. Mingled with the models of human limbs are other thank-offerings of the most varied nature—mirrors, and vases, and coins, and gems, and even cheap jewellery, under which head it is curious to find the mention of an iron ring: the reader of Theophrastus will remember that it was a ring of bronze which the Fussy Man dedicated in the temple of AEsculapius, and which he was always coming to visit and rubbing bright with oil. Excavations of a still more recent date than the Athenian ones—those conducted by M. Kavvadias at Epidaurus in the Peloponnese— have thrown much light, during the last two or three years, on another great centre of AEsculapian worship. Not even the temple of AEsculapius at Athens in the fourth century B.c., nor that at Pergamon in the days of Aurelius and Caracalla, could vie for fame and sanctity with the temple at Epidaurus. Epidaurus was the metropolis of AEsculapian worship, and even the Athenian and Perga- mene cults confessed that they were offshoots of her parent stem. About Epidaurus there clustered legends of the infancy of the God of Healing, and in its temple stood a famous statue of the god, by the artist Thrasymedes, probably a follower of Phidias. That statue —made of gold and ivory—has long since disappeared; but coins of Epidaurus, preserved in the museums of London and Berlin, still convey some notion of its original form. A great theatre constructed by the sculptor Polycleitus gave further eclat to the place; and even when Greece had lost her autonomy, the Emperor Antoninus constructed at Epi-

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