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THE GREEKS BEFORE HIPPOKRATES. 39
to the injunctions of the priests and with painstaking care
follow their orders.
As in the famous Amphiaraion and in other ancient
oracular places so too in the temples of ASKLEPIOS means
of cure were suggested by dreams. The sufferers slept
during the night in the hall of the temple and awaited the
dreams in which the deity should reveal himself to them.
When, in them, the treatment of their malady was not
clearly and plainly pronounced, they told the substance
of their dreams to the priests and their assistants, who
expounded the same to them, naming the remedy they
were to apply. If the patient on the first night had no
dream at all, he passed another and if necessary a third
night in the Asklepieion. If dreams refused to come to
him altogether, he begged the priest or some other
man of a pious disposition to sleep there for him and to
dream. This method of consultation by deputy was
already customary at oracles* and led, later on, to deceit;
for cunning speculators, like many spiritualistic mediums
of the present day, turned the intercourse with celestial
beings into a profitable business.! The deceit was of
a still grosser kind when the priests appeared at night
in the mask of the god to the visitors at the temple in
order to make them believe they had been dreaming.
ARISTOPHANES has represented this in his comedy of Plutos
in an exceedingly droll manner.J
The remedies which were enjoined were—at least in the
more ancient times—rather of a dietetic and psychical than
of a strictly medical character. Many of the methods of
cure recommended were thoroughly rational § and highly
adapted to bring about a successful issue. W T hich may
* HERODOT. viii, c. 134.
t Cf. the biography of APOLLONIOS of Tyana by PHILOSTRATOS i, 89. iv, 1.
% v, 620 et seq.
§ Cf. VERCOUTRE: "La Medicine sacerdotale dans l'antiquite grecque " in
the Re-vue Archeolog, Paris 1885. Ser. iii, T. 6, p. 285 etseq.-v. WILLAMO-
WITZ-MOELLENDORFP: Die Kur des M. J. Apellas, in dessen PhiloK Untersuchungen,
Berlin 1886, H. 9, S. 116 et seq.