Aesculapius

There is too that lyric poet — Pindar I mean — who sings that Aesculapius, for the desert of his avarice, because he practised medicine to men's hurt, was condemned by the thunderbolt.

That very virgin Heavenly Goddess, promiser of rains, that very Aesculapius, revealer of medicines, supplier of life on another day to Socordius and Tenatius and Asclepiodotus who were dying — unless they confess themselves demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, then shed there the blood of that most insolent Christian!

" The same man, too, though he had some perception of the truth in denying the gods, yet at his end ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius — in honour, I suppose, of his father, because Apollo had pronounced Socrates the wisest of all men.

Hence Hercules, hence Castor and Pollux, hence Aesculapius, hence Liber too (I mean the Liber born of Semele, not him whom our forefathers solemnly and reverently consecrated as Liber with Ceres and Libera, the nature of which may be understood from the mysteries;

These, then, must be held gods, though born of mortal mothers.

Leucothea, who was Ino, and her son Palaemon, all Greece worships — as well as Hercules, Aesculapius, the sons of Tyndareus, our own Romulus, and very many others, whom they think received into heaven as it were new and enrolled citizens.

The chill had now reached the region about the groin, and uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said—and these were his last words— Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius.

and yet in disregard of our principles the tragedians and Pindar affirm that Asclepius, though he was the son of Apollo, was bribed by gold to heal a man already at the point of death, and that for this cause he was struck by the lightning.

And to require medicine, said I, not merely for wounds or the incidence of some seasonal maladies, but, because of sloth and such a regimen as we described, to fill one’s body up with winds and humors like a marsh and compel the ingenious sons of Aesculapius to invent for diseases such names as fluxes and flatulences—don’t you think that disgraceful?

The appropriate one, said I, for a man who did not know that it was not from ignorance or inacquaintance with this type of medicine that Aesculapius did not discover it to his descendants, but because he knew that for all well-governed peoples there is a work assigned to each man in the city which he must perform, and no one has leisure to be sick and doctor himself all his days.

For to Aesculapius and his mother they make funeral offerings among the dead.

This wisdom from the school of heaven is freer to deny the gods of the age — it would not play the hypocrite by ordering a cock to be paid to Aesculapius;

Aesculapius first explored remedies:

For I too sacrifice a cock to myself, no less than Socrates to Aesculapius;

The likeness of it is, today, the priesthood already of your own Aesculapius.

A better philosophy has now deigned to honour you, from the time you began to clothe a Christian.

When this very cloak, more peevishly arranged, and sandals Greek-fashion, flatter Aesculapius — how much the more then would you arraign that cloak, and press it with your eyes, as guilty, even if now of a simple and unaffected, yet still a superstition?

You stand beneath Aesculapius, you adorn Juno in bronze, you put black-formed helmets upon Minerva, and you call to witness none of the gods present.