Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/215

 ASKLEPIADS AT KOS, FEIKKA, ETC. 183 living descendants. 1 The sick visitors at Kos, or Trikka, or Epidaurus, were numerous and constant, and the tablets usually hung up to record the particulars of their maladies, the remedies resorted to, and the cures operated by the god, formed both an interesting decoration of the sacred ground and an instructive memorial to the Asklepiads. 2 The genealogical descent of Hippocrates and the other Askle- piads from the god Asklepius is not only analogous to that of Hekatseus and Solon from their respective ancestoral gods, but also to that of the Lacedaemonian kings from Herakles, upon the basis of which the whole supposed chronology of the ante-histo- rical times has been built, from Eratosthenes and Apollodorus down to the chronologers of the present century .3 I shall revert to this hereafter. 1 Strabo, viii. p. 374 ; Aristophan. Vcsp. 122 ; Plutus, 635-750 ; where the visit to the temple of JEsculapius is described in great detail, though with a broad farcical coloring. During the last illness of Alexander the Great, several of his principal officers slept in the temple of Sernpis. in the hope that remedies would be suggested to them in their dreams (Arrian, vii. 26). Pausanias, in describing the various temples of Asklepius which he saw, announces as a fact quite notorious and well-understood, " Here cures are wrought by the god" (ii. 36, 1 ; iii. 26. 7 ; vii. 27, 4) : see Suidas, v. 'Apia- rapxo^. The Orations of Aristides, especially the 6th and 7th, Asklepius and the Asklepiadce, are the most striking manifestations of faith and thanks* giving towards ^Esculapius, as well as attestations of his extensive working throughout the Grecian world ; also Orat. 23 and 25, 'lepuv Aoyof, 1 and 3 ; and Or. 45 (De Ehetorica, p. 22. Dind.), al T' fa 'Atr/c^Tnov TUV asl diarpi- 06vTuv aye7.al, etc. yvvaiKuv bvofiara uKEa&evTuv itirb TOV 'Aff/c^TTtoii, Trpoaen 6e ical v6ffjjfj.a, o. TI EKaarof ivoaqas, Kal ojruf la&ij, the cures are wrought by the god himself. 3 "Apollodorus aetatem Hercnlis pro cardine chronologi habuit " (Heyue, ad Apollodfr. Fragm. p. 410).
 * Pausan. ii. 27, 3; 36, 1. Tavraic kyyeypu.mj.Eva ia-.i nal uvtipuv ml