"The following day as I was offering sacrifice, a flame leapt up and caught my hand, so as to cause blisters. Yet after a little my hand was healed.
"As I prolonged my stay in the Temple, the god told me to use dill along with olive-oil for my head-aches. Formerly I had not suffered from head-aches, but my studies had brought on congestion. After I used the olive-oil, I was cured of head-aches. For swollen glands the god told me to use a cold gargle, when I consulted him about it, and he ordered the same treatment for inflamed tonsils.
"He bade me inscribe this treatment, and I left the Temple in good health and full of gratitude to the god."[[51]]
Pausanias
Pausanias speaks of "the buildings erected in our time by Antoninus a man of the Conscript Senate"—a Roman Senator in fact,[[52]]—in honour of Asklepios at Epidauros, a bath, three temples, a colonnade, and "a house where a man may die, and a woman lie in, without sin," for these actions were not "holy" within the sanctuary precincts, and had had to be done in the open air hitherto.
A more conspicuous patient of Asklepios is Ælius Aristides, the rhetorician. This brilliant and hypochondriacal person spent years in watching his symptoms and consulting the god about them. Early in his illness the god instructed him to record its details, and he obeyed with zest, though in after years he was not always able to record the minuter points with complete clearness. He was bidden to make speeches, to rub himself over with mud, to plunge into icy water, to ride, and, once, to be bled to the amount of 120 litres. As the human body does not contain anything like that amount of blood, and as the temple servants knew of no one ever having been "cut" to that extent—"at least except Ischyron, and his was one of the most remarkable cases," the god was not taken literally.[[53]] The regular plan was to sleep in the Temple, as already mentioned, and the god came. "The impression was that one could touch him, and perceive that he came in person; as if one were between asleep and awake, and wished to look out and were in an agony lest he should depart too soon,—as if one held one's ear and listened—sometimes as in a dream, and then as in a waking vision—one's hair was on end, and tears of joy were shed, and one felt light-hearted. And who among men could set this forth in words? Yet if there is one of the initiated, he knows and recognises [what I say]."[[54]]
None of the cases yet quoted can compare with the miracles of ancient days to be read in the inscriptions about the place—stories of women with child for three and five years, of the extraordinary surgery of the god, cutting off the head of a dropsical patient, holding him upside down to let the water run out and putting the head on again,—a mass of absurdities hardly to be matched outside The Glories of Mary. They make Lucian's Philopseudes seem tame.
There were other gods, beside Asklepios, who gave oracles in shrine and dream. Pausanias the traveller has left a book on Greece and its antiquities, temples, gods and legends of extraordinary value. "A man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould," as Dr Frazer characterizes him,—and therefore the more representative—he went through Greece with curious eyes and he saw much that no one else has recorded. At Sparta stood the only temple he knew of which had an upper story. In this upper story was an image of Aphrodite Morpho fettered[[55]]—a silly thing he thought it to fetter a cedar-wood doll. He particularly visited Phigalea, because of the "Black Demeter"—a curious enough image she had been, though by then destroyed.[[56]] He was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries.[[57]] He tells us that the stony remnants of the lump of clay from which Prometheus fashioned the first man were still preserved,[[58]] and that the sceptre which Hephaistos made for Agamemnon received a daily sacrifice in Chæronea, Plutarch's city—"a table is set beside it covered with all sorts of flesh and cakes."[[59]] He has many such stories. He tells us too about a great many oracles of his day, of which that of Amphilochus at Mallus in Cilicia" is the most infallible"[[60]]—a curiously "suggestive superlative (apseudéstation). He is greatly interested in Asklepios, but for our present purpose a few sentences from his elaborate account of the ceremony with which Trophonius is consulted at Lebadea must suffice.
After due rites the inquirer comes to the oracle, in a linen tunic with ribbons, and boots of the country. Inside bronze railings is a pit of masonry, some four ells across and eight deep, and he goes down into it by means of a light ladder brought for the occasion. At the bottom he finds a hole, a very narrow one. "So he lays himself on his back on the ground, and holding in his hand barley cakes kneaded with honey, he thrusts his feet first into the hole, and follows himself endeavouring to get his knees through the hole. When they are through, the rest of his body is immediately dragged after them and shoots in, just as a man might be caught and dragged down by the swirl of a mighty and rapid river. Once they are inside the shrine the future is not revealed to all in one and the same way, but to one it is given to see and to another to hear. They return through the same aperture feet foremost.... When a man has come up from Trophonius, the priests take him in hand again, and set him on what is called the chair of Memory, which stands not far from the shrine; and, being seated there, he is questioned by them as to all he saw and heard. On being informed, they hand him over to his friends who carry him, still overpowered with fear, and quite unconscious of himself and his surroundings, to the building where he lodged before, the house of Good Fortune and the Good Dæmon. Afterwards, however, he will have all his wits as before, and the power of laughter will come back to him. I write not from mere hearsay: I have myself consulted Trophonius and have seen others who have done so. All who have gone down to Trophonius are obliged to set up a tablet containing a record of all they heard and saw."[[61]]
A man who has been through such an experience may be excused for believing much. While Pausanias kept his Greek habit of criticism and employs it on occasional myths and traditions, and particularly on stories of hell—though the fact of punishment after death he seems to accept—yet his travels and his inquiries made an impression on him. "When I began this work, I used to look on these Greek stories as little better than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as Arcadia, my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronos [swallowing a foal instead of his child] is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition."[[62]]