We have hitherto mentioned the name of Aesculapius but casually, though there was no god of antiquity more celebrated for curing every species of malady by the incubatory process. He was particularly designated by the Greeks as "the sender of dreams," [Greek: Oneiropompon]; nor could any other deity boast of so great a number of those oracles. The most distinguished of these was the oracle of Epidaurus, in the Argivian territory; from which spot his worship extended over a great proportion of the old world;--hither, as being the place of his birth and the site of his richest temple, crowds of sick persons constantly repaired in quest of dreams. The success attending them was diligently set forth on every wall of the temple; where the _tabulae votivae_ recorded the names of those who had been healed, the nature of their maladies, and the cure which the god prescribed. Similar circumstances are related of his Temple at Triccae, in Thessaly, where Esculapius was held in great veneration at a very early period; there appears also to have been another such temple either at or near Athens,[105] where we must look for the scene of the ridiculous cure which Aristophanes makes Aesculapius to perform on the blind god of riches. Though there is undoubtedly a rich vein of the burlesque in the Plutus of the Grecian dramatist, yet we may gather much concerning our present subject from the scene in which the slave, who had attended Plutus in the Temple, relates the whole process of his master's wife. Here also the night was the chosen period of incubation. Before the signal for sleep was given, the officiants of the temple extinguished all the lights in the sick men's chamber; thus involving them in a solemn stillness and obscurity highly favourable to the work in hand, but in a particular manner to the subterfuge of the priests, who enacted the nocturnal apparition of Aesculapius to his sick client. This passage in Plutus is certainly the earliest circumstantial relation we possess of the practice of this species of incubation.[106] The license permitted to Grecian comedy was such as to authorise the ridicule and contempt of the most popular deities; we are not, therefore to conclude from the scenes that there were many unbelievers, or that this ancient system of cure had sunk into disrepute: for the history of our comedian's great contemporary, Hippocrates, informs us, that at this very time the temple of Aesculapius at Cos abounded in tablets, on which the sick attested the remedies that had been revealed to them during incubation, and that he himself was highly indebted to them for much of his medical knowledge.