ase, had a more
successful "run" than Asklepios--for more than a thousand years the
consoler and healer of the sons of men. Shorn of his divine attributes
he remains our patron saint, our emblematic God of Healing, whose figure
with the serpents appears in our seals and charters. He was originally a
Thessalian chieftain, whose sons, Machaon and Podalirius, became famous
physicians and fought in the Trojan War. Nestor, you may remember,
carried off the former, declaring, in the oft-quoted phrase, that a
doctor was better worth saving than many warriors unskilled in the
treatment of wounds. Later genealogies trace his origin to Apollo,(10)
as whose son he is usually regarded. "In the wake of northern tribes
this god Aesculapius--a more majestic figure than the blameless leech
of Homer's song--came by land to Epidaurus and was carried by sea to
the east-ward island of Cos.... Aesculapius grew in importance with the
growth of Greece, but may not have attained his greatest power until
Greece and Rome were one."(11)

(10) W. H. Roscher: Lexikon der griechischen und romischen
Mythologie, Leipzig, 1886, I, p. 624.

(11) Louis Dyer: Studies of the Gods in Greece, 1891, p.
221.

A word on the idea of the serpent as an emblem of the healing art which
goes far back into antiquity. The mystical character of the snake, and
the natural dread and awe inspired by it, early made it a symbol of
supernatural power. There is a libation vase of Gudea, c. 2350 B.C.,
found at Telloh, now in the Louvre (probably the earliest representation
of the symbol), with two serpents entwined round a staff (Jastrow, Pl.
4). From the earliest times the snake has been associated with mystic
and magic power, and even today, among native races, it plays a part in
the initiation of medicine men.

In Greece, the serpent became a symbol of Apollo, and prophetic
serpents were kept and fed at his shrine, as well as at that of his son,
Asklepios. There was an idea, too, that snakes had a knowledge of herbs,
which is referred to in the famous poem of Nikander on Theriaka.(12) You
may remember that when Alexander, the famous quack and oracle monger,
depicted by Lucian, started out "for revenue," the first thing he did
was to provide himself with two of the large, harmless, yellow snakes of
Asia Minor.

(12) Lines 31, etc., and Scholia; cf. W. R. Halliday: Greek
Divination, London, 1913, p. 88.

The exact date of the introductio