The temples of Æsculapius, the god of healing, had long been used as a kind of hospital for the sick, but never before to such an extent as in the Antonine age. The priests of this god were initiated into a secret medical lore. His temples could vie with the great medieval monasteries in the scenic beauty and salubrity of their surroundings. The excellence of the climate, the traditional lore, the healthy diet and more healthy abstinence, the careful nursing and the freshness and brightness of the surroundings, were really efficacious remedies. Thus, those who laboured under any illness came far and near to the most famous shrines, such as that of Epidaurus, whose ruins still remain as a silent witness of its whilom greatness. Their hope was that they would be favoured with a dream or vision from the kindly god as to the remedy for their disease. The career of Aristeides, wandering for thirteen years with fanatical enthusiasm from shrine to shrine till finally he was cured, shows to what extremes superstition carried some of those devotees. On one occasion while suffering from a fever, he thought he had a vision of the god bidding him bathe in the ice-cold water, and then run a mile, and he carried out this and many other such assuredly unearthly remedies despite the dissuasions of the priests. These priests, the _neocoroi_, used to interpret the dream, and the prescriptions were carried out by medical men and attendants. The belief in the efficacy of these dream-sent prescriptions was not confined to the vulgar. Marcus Aurelius believed that he himself had been cured thus; and his wise physician, Galen, trusted them. Readers of _Marius, the Epicurean_, will not easily forget Pater’s description of Marius’ stay in the Temple, nor the words of thanksgiving addressed to the heaven-sent dreams which he puts on his lips at parting; they are from the Asclepiadæ of Aristeides: “O ye children of Apollo! who in time past have stilled the waves of sorrow from many people, lighting up a lamp of safety before those who travel by sea and land, be pleased, in your great condescension, though ye be equal in glory with your elder brethren, the Dioscuri, and your lot in immortal youth be as theirs, to accept the prayer, which in sleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it aright, I pray you, according to your loving kindness to men. Preserve me from sickness, and endue my body with such a measure of health as may suffice it for the obeying of the spirit, that I may pass my days unhindered and in quietness.”