Artemis, or Diana, as the Romans called the Greek goddess, was a deity who, inviolate and vigorous herself, granted health and strength to others. She was the sister of Apollo, and though a dispenser of life could, like her brother, send death and disease amongst men and animals. Sudden deaths, especially amongst women, were described as the effect of her arrows. She was θεὰ σώτειρα, who assuaged the sufferings of mortals. When Æneas was wounded, she healed him in the temple of Apollo.[333] Yet Artemis ταυροπόλος produced madness in the minds of men.[334]
She was the Cretan Diktynna, and that goddess wore a wreath of the magic plant diktamnon or dictamnus, called by us dittany (dictamnus ruber, or albus); it grows in abundance on Mounts Dicté and Ida in Crete.
The Cretan goddess Britomartis was sometimes identified with Artemis. She too was a goddess of health as also of birth, and was supposed to dispense happiness to mortals.
Bacchus, or, as he was called by the Greeks, Dionysus, as the god of wine, and an inspired and an inspiring deity, who revealed the future by oracles, cured diseases by discovering to sufferers in their dreams their appropriate remedies. The prophet, the priest, and the physician are so often blended in one in the early history of civilization, that the same ideas naturally clustered round Bacchus as around Apollo, and other great benefactors of mankind. The giver of vines and wine was the dispenser of the animating, exalting, intoxicating powers of nature. As wine restores the flagging energies of the body and mind, and seems to have the power of calling back to life the departing spirit, and inspiring the languishing vitality of man, Bacchus would naturally enough be a god of medicine. The intoxicating properties of wine would be connected with inspiration, and so Bacchus had a share in the oracles of Delphi and Amphicleia. He was invoked as a θεὸς σωτήρ against raging diseases.
Ammon was an Ethiopian divinity whose worship spread over Egypt, and thence to Greece, and was described as the spirit pervading the universe, and as the author of all life in nature.
Hermes Trismegistus of the Greeks was identified in the time of Plato with Thoth, Thot, or Theut of the Egyptians.[335]
The Egyptian Thoth was considered the father of all knowledge, and everything committed to writing was looked upon as his property; he was therefore the embodied eek: λόγος, and so τρὶς μέγιστος, or the superlatively greatest. He was identified by the Greeks more or less completely with their own Hermes, or Mercury as he was known to the Romans; he was the messenger of the gods; as dreams are sent by Zeus, it was his office to convey them to men, and he had power to grant refreshing sleep or to deny the blessing. As the gods revealed the remedies for sickness in dreams, Hermes became a god of medicine.
Thoth, the ibis-headed, was the Egyptian god of letters, the deity of wisdom in general, who aided Horus in his conflict with Seth, and recorded the judgments of the dead before Osiris. Hermes κριοφόρος, the averter of diseases, was worshipped in Bœotia. Hermes, the Greek deity, was king of the dead and the conductor of souls to their future home. Probably, therefore, we may rightly look upon Thoth, Hermes, and Hermes Trismegistus as the same person. By many Thoth is considered to be the Egyptian Æsculapius, as he was the inventor of the healing art; the Phœnician god Esmun, one of the ancient Cabiri, was invested with similar attributes, and was worshipped at Carthage and Berytus. The authorship of the oldest Egyptian works on medicine is ascribed to Thoth. These were engraved on pillars of stone. The works of Thoth were ultimately incorporated into the so-called “Hermetic Books.” Clement of Alexandria, who is our only ancient authority on these Hermetic works, says they were forty-two in number.
Prometheus (the man of freethought) is considered by Æschylus as the founder of human civilization.
Æschylus, in his Prometheus Chained, makes the god say how he had taught each useful art to man. As regards medicine, he says:—