centuries a large amount of empiric knowledge was accumulated at these temples, and probably the pretence of supernatural aid was far more rare than we suppose. In an exhaustive study of the subject recently published by Dr. Aravintinos, of Athens, that authority expresses the opinion that the temples served as hospitals for all kinds of sufferers, and that arrangements were provided in them for prolonged treatment. He thinks that in special cases the treatment was carried out during the mysterious sleep, when it was desired to keep from the patient an exact knowledge of what was being done; but generally he supposes a course of normal medication or hygiene was followed. Forty-two inscriptions have been discovered, but on analysing these Dr. Aravintinos comes to the conclusion that they record in most cases only cures effected by rational means, and not by miracles. He finds massage, purgatives, emetics, diaphoresis, bleeding, baths, poulticing, and such like methods indicated, and though the sleeps, possibly hypnotic, are often mentioned, this is not by any means the case invariably.
About a century before Hippocrates wrote and practised, the Asclepiads began to reveal their secrets. The revolt against the mysteries and trickeries of the temples was incited by the infidelity to their oaths of certain of the Italian disciples of Pythagoras. The school of philosophy and medicine founded by that mystic aimed also to keep his doctrines secret, but when the colony he had established at Crotona, in South Italy, was dispersed by the attacks of the mob, a number of the initiates travelled about under the title of Periodeutes practising medicine often in close proximity to an Æsculapian temple. The first of the Asclepiads to yield to this competition were those of Cnidos, but the school
