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, Who from the blameless Æsculapius sprung;’[105] which is just as much as if he had said, ‘Call a man who is a son of a god.’”[106] In the indulgence of their myth-forming fancies it was very reasonable, very wise, on the part of the Greeks to make Æsculapius the offspring of Apollo. If the god of medicine be viewed as a personification of the healing powers of nature, what more rational, as has been observed, than to take him to be “the son, the effects of Helios, Apollo, or the sun.”[107] The mythological history of the Grecian god of medicine is strange and interesting. One must know it, or he will remain in the dark about many things bearing on the symbolism and other features of the physician’s art. Æsculapius was the result, so the story runs, of a criminal _liaison_ between Apollo and a young virgin, named Coronis, a native of Thessaly—something which the myth-makers apparently did not regard as discreditable. The morals of many of the gods were exceedingly bad. “Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints,”[108] is a candid remark of Thoreau. It would appear that the ancients were corrupted by communication with the gods.