A more conspicuous patient of Asklepios is AElius Aristides, the rhetorician. This brilliant and hypochondriacal person spent years in watching his symptoms and consulting the god about them. Early in his illness the god instructed him to record its details, and he obeyed with zest, though in after years he was not always able to record the minuter points with complete clearness. He was bidden to make speeches, to rub himself over with mud, to plunge into icy water, to ride, and, once, to be bled to the amount of 120 litres. As the human body does not contain anything like that amount of blood, and as the temple servants knew of no one ever having been "cut" to that extent--"at least except Ischyron, and his was one of the most remarkable cases," the god was not taken literally.[53] The regular plan was to sleep in the Temple, as already mentioned, and the god came. "The impression was that one could touch him, and perceive that he came in person; as if one were between asleep and awake, and wished to look out and were in an agony lest he should depart too soon,--as if one held one's ear and listened--sometimes as in a dream, and then as in a waking vision--one's hair was on end, and tears of joy were shed, and one felt light-hearted. And who among {223} men could set this forth in words? Yet if there is one of the initiated, he knows and recognises [what I say]."[54] None of the cases yet quoted can compare with the miracles of ancient days to be read in the inscriptions about the place--stories of women with child for three and five years, of the extraordinary surgery of the god, cutting off the head of a dropsical patient, holding him upside down to let the water run out and putting the head on again,--a mass of absurdities hardly to be matched outside _The Glories of Mary_. They make Lucian's _Philopseudes_ seem tame.