In former years and down almost to the present time, it was the custom among English medical writers to speak of Aesculapius only as the "God of Medicine," thus conveying to the minds of many readers that he was a mythological character, not a real personage. To-day, and especially since Schliemann has demonstrated, by his excavations at the site of ancient Troy, that Homer's Iliad is not merely a beautiful creation of his poetic fancy, but a narration of events that actually occurred about 1200 B. C., it is quite generally acknowledged that Aesculapius[1] is an historical character, an individual whose memory should receive due honor from the physicians of modern times. Neither Homer nor Pindar speaks of him as a god. In Athens he was publicly deified in 420 B. C.
When Daremberg, as quoted above, expressed the belief that Hippocrates was the product of an earlier civilization, he undoubtedly gave due weight to other circumstances beside those which are narrated in Homer's poems—circumstances, for example, which are referred to casually by several of the classical Greek authors, and to which fresh importance has been given by a number of recent discoveries. Thus, there is an abundance of evidence showing that the Greeks, both before and after Homer's time, held the memory of Aesculapius in the very highest honor. So great, as they believed, was his power over disease, so wonderful were the cures which he accomplished, and so noble and pure was his character, that they made him a god and erected temples in his honor—not mere places where a barren worship might be carried on, but veritable sanatoria—termed Asclepieia—where the extraordinary healing powers of him whom they had made a god might be perpetuated for the benefit of succeeding
- ↑ Aesculapius was held to be the son of Apollo, the god of medicine, and to have been instructed in the art of healing by Chiron, one of the centaurs. Beside his famous sons, Machaon and Podalirius, he had four daughters whose names—Hygieia, Jaso, Panakeia and Aigle—have come down to us through the ages. His wife's name was Epione, and those of his two younger sons were Telesphorus and Janiscus, but all three of these names are rarely mentioned by the Greek writers.
