down to sleep in the cave,
and afterwards order such medicine as have been revealed to them there,
to be furnished to their patients in the temple. They frequently conduct
the sick themselves into the cave, where they remain for several days
together, without touching a morsel of food; nor are the profane
withheld from a participation in the _divinatory_ sleep, though this is
not permitted otherwise than under the controul, and with the sacred
sanction, of the priests. There is, however, nothing more surprising
about this place than that it is esteemed _noxious and fatal to the
healthy_.[104] This last remark of our geographer, proves how jealous the
priestly physicians were of their medical monopoly, and how fearful lest
the _saner_ part of mankind should detect and expose the pretended
virtues of their medical sanctuary.

We have hitherto mentioned the name of Aesculapius but casually, though
there was no god of antiquity more celebrated for curing every species
of malady by the incubatory process. He was particularly designated by
the Greeks as "the sender of dreams," [Greek: Oneiropompon]; nor could
any other deity boast of so great a number of those oracles. The most
distinguished of these was the oracle of Epidaurus, in the Argivian
territory; from which spot his worship extended over a great proportion
of the old world;--hither, as being the place of his birth and the site
of his richest temple, crowds of sick persons constantly repaired in
quest of dreams. The success attending them was diligently set forth on
every wall of the temple; where the _tabulae votivae_ recorded the names
of those who had been healed, the nature of their maladies, and the cure
which the god prescribed. Similar circumstances are related of his
Temple at Triccae, in Thessaly, where Esculapius was held in great
veneration at a very early period; there appears also to have been
another such temple either at or near Athens,[105] where we must look for
the scene of the ridiculous cure which Aristophanes makes Aesculapius to
perform on the blind god of riches. Though there is undoubtedly a rich
vein of the burlesque in the Plutus of the Grecian dramatist, yet we may
gather much concerning our present subject from the scene in which the
slave, who had attended Plutus in the Temple, relates the whole process
of his master's wife. Here also the night was the chosen period of
incubation. Before the signal for sleep was given, the officiants of the