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.

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.

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

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?

Then, shall we not say that it was because Asclepius knew this—that for those who were by nature and course of life sound of body but had some localized disease, that for such, I say, and for this habit he revealed the art of medicine, and, driving out their disease by drugs and surgery, prescribed for them their customary regimen in order not to interfere with their civic duties, but that, when b …

Again, there is a story, still well attested, that Sophocles, during his life, was blessed with the friendship of Aesculapius, and that when he died, another deity procured him fitting burial.

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;

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

Aesculapius first explored remedies:

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?

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.

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.