Why the goat was connected in sacrifice with the god is explained by Tooke thus: “A goat is always in a fever, and, therefore, a goat’s constitution is very contrary to health.”[278] Shakespeare, in “King Lear,” uses the phrase “goatish disposition” in reference to a “whoremaster man.” The fabled satyrs were in part goats in form. I am not aware that there was anything of the Biblical scape-goat principle[279] about the sacrifice, a superstition similar to the one which prevailed “all over Egypt,” as we are told by Herodotus,[280] of praying that evils impending over the people might fall on the head of the sacrificial victim, and then casting it into the Nile, if there was no Greek at hand to whom it could be sold. The great prominence of the goat in the Æsculapian rites in Cyrene may have been due, to some extent at least, to the proximity of Egypt, a country in which the animal played a prominent part. In the goat of Mendes,[281] the incarnation of Khem or Min, was personified, says Lenormant, “in the most brutish manner the reproductive power.”[282] Both the goat and the cock were often associated with the Egyptian Hermes. I may add that the cause of the association of the goat with Æsculapius has been referred to the name. The Abbé Banier states the case thus: “_Es_ or _ex_, which begins the name of the god, signifies a goat in the language of the Phœnicians,[283] and, with a little variation, the same thing in Greek;[284] and this had given rise to the fable of Æsculapius being nursed by that animal.”[285] CHAPTER XI. GODS ANALOGOUS TO ÆSCULAPIUS. The great eminence acquired by the Æsculapian myth among the Grecians might reasonably lead to the belief that it was one entirely special to that imaginative people. Like many other gods, however, of both high and low degree, this one was only in part “to the manor born.” There is good ground for believing that there was what might justly be called a prototype of the divinity of much repute in both Phœnicia and Egypt. Dr. Mayo does not hesitate to say that “Æsculapius was actually known in the Oriental countries before he was in Greece, whither his worship was brought from Phœnicia by the colony of Cadmus and from Egypt by that of Danaus.”[286] It is not improbable that the main conception of the healing god did really long antedate not only the Grecian but both the Phœnician and Egyptian embodiments of it. Evidence of this will be found later in the chapter.