dreams after his decease:
this spot lay in Daunia, on the coast of the Adriatic. The supplicant's
offices began with the offering up of a ram, on whose skin he laid
himself down, and in this situation, received the instruction he sought
for.[95] Amphilocus, a contemporary soothsayer, who accompanied the
Epigoni in the first Theban war, had a similar oracle at Mallos, in
Cilicia, which Pausanias asserts, even at the close of the second
century, to have been the most credible of his age; it is also mentioned
by Dion Cassius, in his history of Commodus.[96]

The most famous, however, of this class of oracles, was that of
Amphiaraus, the father of Amphilocus, which was one of the five
principal oracles of Greece; he had signalized himself as a sapient
soothsayer in the first Theban war; and his oracle was situated at
Oropos, on the borders of Boetia and Attica. Of all others this deserves
our most particular attention, as it was resorted to more frequently in
cases of infirmity and disease, than in any other circumstances. His
responses were always delivered in dreams, in whose interpretation, as
he was the first to possess that faculty. Pausanias says he received
divine honours. Those who repaired to Amphiaraus's oracle to supplicate
his aid, laid themselves down in the manner we have just related, after
several preparatory lustrations and sacrifices, on the skin of a ram
slain in honour of the god, and awaited the dreams, which were to
unfold the means of their different cures.

Lustrations and sacrifices were not, however, the only preparatives for
inducing the visionary disposition. The priests subjected the patients
to various others, which Philostratus affirms[97] to have been very
instrumental towards rendering the sleeper's mind clear and unclouded.
Part of these preparatives consisted in one day's abstinence from
eating, and three, nay, even in some cases, fifteen days' abstinence
from wine, the common beverage of the Greeks. This was the practice also
with other oracles; nor were the priests in the meantime insensible to
their own interests on these occasions; for those who were cured by
Amphiaraus's revelations were permitted to bathe in the sacred waters of
a fountain, into which they were enjoined to cast pieces of gold and
silver, which were destined, most probably, to sweeten the labours of
his officiants.

The oracles, whose intervention was principally or altogether sought for
the healing of the sick by