CHAPTER XXVI.
And near Lessa is Epidaurus in Argolis, and before you get to the town itself, you will come to the temple of Æsculapius. I do not know who dwelt in this place before Epidaurus came to it: nor could I learn from any of the people of the neighbourhood anything about his descendants. But the last king they say before the Dorians came to the Peloponnese was Pityreus, the descendant of Ion the son of Xuthus. He they say gave up the land without fighting for it to Deiphontes and the Argives: and retired to Athens with his subjects and dwelt there, and Deiphontes and the Argives who espoused his cause occupied Epidauria. For there was a split among the Argives at the death of Temenus, Deiphontes and Hyrnetho being hostile to the sons of Temenus, and the army with them favouring Deiphontes and Hyrnetho more than Cisus and his brothers. Epidaurus, from whom the country got its name, was, as the people of Elis say, the son of Pelops: but according to the opinion of the Argives, and the poem of Hesiod called The Great Eœæ, the father of Epidaurus was Argus the son of Zeus. But the Epidaurians make Epidaurus the son of Apollo. And the district was generally held sacred to Æsculapius for the following reason. The Epidaurians say that Phlegyas came to the Peloponnese on the pretext of seeing the country, but really to spy out the population, and see if the number of fighting men was large. For Phlegyas was the greatest warrior of that day, and, whoever he attacked, used to carry off their corn and fruit and booty of all kinds. But when he came to the Peloponnese his daughter followed him, who though her father knew it not was with child by Apollo. And when she bore her child on Epidaurian soil, she exposed it on the mountain called in our day Titthion, but which was then called Myrgion. And as he was exposed there one of the she-goats feeding on the mountain gave him milk, and the watch-dog of the flock guarded him. And Aresthanas, for that was the name of the goat-herd, when he found the number of the goats not tallying and that the dog was also absent from the flock, went in search everywhere, and when he saw the child desired to take him away, but when he got near saw lightning shining from the child, and thinking there was something divine in all this, as indeed there was, he turned away. And it was forthwith noised abroad about the lad both by land and sea that he could heal sicknesses, and raise the dead. There is also another tradition told of him, that Coronis, when pregnant with Æsculapius, lay with Ischys the son of Elatus, and that she was put to death by Artemis who thus punished her unfaithfulness to Apollo, and when the funeral pyre was already lighted Hermes is said to have plucked the child from the flame. And a third tradition is as it seems to me the least likely of all, which makes Æsculapius the son of Arsinoe, the daughter of Leucippus. For when Apollophanes the Arcadian went to Delphi and enquired of the god, whether Æsculapius was the son of Arsinoe and a citizen at Messene, Apollo answered from his oracle, “O Æsculapius, that art born a great joy to all mortals, whom lovely Coronis, the daughter of Phlegyas, bare to me the child of love, at rocky Epidaurus.” This oracular response shows plainly that Æsculapius was not the son of Arsinoe, but that Hesiod, or somebody that interpolated Hesiod, inserted that legend to please the people of Messene. And this too bears me out that Æsculapius was born at Epidaurus, that his worship is derived from thence. For the Athenians call the day on which they worship Æsculapius Epidauria, and they say the god is worshipped by them from Epidaurus; and also Archias the son of Aristæchmus, being healed in Epidauria of a convulsion that seized him when he was hunting near Pindasus, introduced the worship of the god at Pergamum. And from the people of Pergamum it passed in our time to the people of Smyrna. And at Balagræ amongst the Cyrenæans the Epidaurian Æsculapius is called Doctor. And from the Cyrenæans Æsculapius got worshipped in Labene among the Cretans. And there is this difference between the Cyrenæan and Epidaurian customs of worshipping Æsculapius, that the former sacrifice goats, which is not customary with the latter. And I find that Æsculapius was considered as a god from the beginning, and not merely as he got fame as time went on, from other proofs, and the testimony of Homer in what Agamemnon says about Machaon,
“Talthybius, call here as quickly as possible Machaon the mortal, the son of Æsculapius,”
as if he said the man the son of the god.[28]