He is represented sitting upon a throne, crowned with a mitre full of small orbs, to intimate his superiority over all the globe. The gourd upon the mitre implies his action and influence upon moisture, which, and the Nile particularly, was termed by the Egyptians, the efflux of Osīris. The lower part of his habit is made up of descending rays, and his body is surrounded with orbs. His right hand is extended in a commanding attitude, and his left holds a _thyrsus_ or staff of the _papyrus_, pointing out the principle of humidity, and the fertility thence flowing, under his direction. ÆSCULAPIUS. The name of Æsculapius, whom the Greeks called Ασκληπιος, appears to have been foreign, and derived from the oriental languages. Being honored as a god in Phœnicia and Egypt, his worship passed into Greece, and was established, first at Epidaurus, a city of Peloponnesus, bordering on the sea, where, probably, some colonies first settled; a circumstance sufficient for the Greeks to give out that this god was a native of Greece. Not to mention all we are told of his parents, it will be enough to observe, that the opinion generally received in Greece, made him the son of Apollo by Corōnis, daughter of Phlegyas; and indeed the Messenians, who consulted the oracle of Delphi to know where Æsculapius was born, and of what parents, were told by the oracle, or more properly Apollo, that he himself was his father; that Corōnis was his mother, and that their son was born at Epidaurus. Phlegyas, the most warlike man of his age, having gone into Peloponnesus under pretence of travelling, but, in truth, to spy into the condition of the country, carried his daughter Corōnis thither, who, to conceal her situation from her father, went to Epidaurus: there she was delivered of a son, whom she exposed upon a mountain, called to this day Mount Titthion, or _of the breast_; but before this adventure, Myrthion, from the myrtles that grew upon it. The reason of this change of name was, that the child, having been here abandoned, was suckled by one of those goats of the mountain, which the dog of Aristhĕnes the goat-herd guarded. When Aristhĕnes came to review his flock, he found a she-goat and his dog missing, and going in search of them discovered the child. Upon approaching to lift him from the earth, he perceived his head encircled with fiery rays, which made him believe the child to be of divine origin. As Κορωνη in the Greek language signifies a crow, hence another fable arose importing, as we see in Lucian, that Æsculapius had sprung from an egg of a bird, under the figure of a serpent. Whatever these fictions may mean, Æsculapius being removed from the mount on which he was exposed, was nursed by Trigo or Trigone, who was probably the wife of the goat-herd that found him; and when he was capable of improving by Chiron, Phlegyas (to whom he had doubtless been returned) put him under the Centaur's tuition.