Cato, who died in the year of the city of Rome 605, said, authoritatively: “They (the Greeks) have conspired among themselves to murder all barbarians with their medicine, a profession which they exercise for lucre, in order that they may win our confidence and despatch us all the more easily. I forbid you to have anything to do with physicians.”[15] Notwithstanding this, the imperious old Roman had not a personal dislike to taking medicine; “far from it, by Hercules,” says Pliny, “for he subjoins an account of the medical prescriptions by the aid of which he had ensured to himself and his wife a ripe old age.”[16]
It appears that the first physician who exercised his profession at Rome was “Archagathus, the son of Lysanias, who came over from Peloponnessus in the year of the city 335.” He was kindly welcomed, and, from his special line of practice, was called “Vulnerarius;” but, from cruelty displayed “in cutting and searing his patients, he brought the art and physicians into disrepute.”[17] It is this experience to which Pliny refers in the foregoing quotation.
There is reason to believe that the Romans never regarded medicine as an art appreciatively. They have transmitted to posterity little that is original and valuable. Besides what is found in Pliny’s work, the production of Celsus[18] is about all that calls for special mention, and it is possible that the latter, as well as the former, was only a compiler. Pliny significantly says: “The art of medicine at the present time even teaches us in numerous instances to have recourse to the oracles for aid.”[19] He lived from 23 to 79 A.D.
The Roman people had no special god of medicine until the year 292 B.C. In the preceding year, the prevalence of a pestilence caused much consternation. This led to a consultation of the Delphian Oracle, or, according to Livy (see page 9), the Sibylline Books, as to what should be done, and the command of “the Delphic Oracle, or of the Sibylline Books,” to use the language of an authoritative work,[20] was given, to send an embassy to procure the aid of the Grecian god of healing, Æsculapius.
The story of the bringing of Æsculapius to Rome, like that of the bringing of Cybele from Pessinus in Galatia, is an interesting one, and must be known if one would fully appreciate the fact of the god being given the serpentine form, the serpent being generally regarded as only an attribute of him at his chief seat, the great Epidaurian Asclepion, or Temple of Health. It is graphically told by Ovid.
Ovid begins his poem[21] with an invocation to the “melodious maids of Pindus;” and, addressing them, continues:—
“Say, whence the isle which Tiber flows around,
Its altars with a heavenly stranger grac’d,
And in our shrines the God of Physic plac’d?”