He drew the dolours from the wounded part,
And breath’d a spirit in his rising heart.”[93]
One of the names often applied to Apollo,[94] and subsequently to his son,[95] was distinctly medical, viz., Pæon, or Paieon.[96] Homer always uses it in referring to the physician of the Olympian gods, as where he speaks of the Pharian race as “from Pæon sprung.”[97] “Pæonian herbs”[98] is the phrase used by Virgil in his account of the restoration to life of Hippolytus. And this leads me to say that Apollo was believed to have a special knowledge of medicinal plants. By Ovid he is represented as saying:—
“What herbs and simples grow
In fields, in forests, all their power I know.”[99]
It may be further said that Apollo always continued to have healing powers accorded him. No more proof of this is wanting than the first clause of the Hippocratic oath—“I swear by Apollo, the physician.”
It would seem to have been about the time of the Trojan war that the special god of medicine began to be viewed as such by the Greeks. Strong reason for so believing is found in the fact that Homer refers to Æsculapius as simply “a blameless doctor,”[100]—a mortal, the adjective used never being applied to a god. A well-informed writer remarks that “the kernel out of which the whole myth has grown is, perhaps, the account we read in Homer.”[101] This opinion is open to question. Even the title of Archegetes, or Primeval Divinity, was sometimes given to Æsculapius, and, indeed, under that title he was worshipped by the Phocians in a temple situated eighty stadia[102] from Tithorea. This name was also given, it must be said, to Apollo, from whom probably it was received by the son. I may add here the suggestion of the Abbé Banier, that likely a distinguished physician, called Æsculapius,[103] of the age of Hercules and Jason, being highly honored, was in time confounded with the old Phœnician and Egyptian god, Esmun; “so that in process of time the worship of the latter came to be quite forgotten, and the new god substituted altogether in his room.”[104]
Galen expresses doubt whether the divinity of Æsculapius was the result of a gradual development from a human basis; but Pausanias says: “That Æsculapius was from the first considered as a god, and that his fame was not owing to length of time, I find confirmed by various arguments, and even by the authority of Homer, in the following verses, in which Agamemnon thus speaks of Machaon:—
‘Talthibius, hither swift, Machaon bring,