of miraculous cures.  And yet many of these tales are not intended as actual facts, but rather as pious legends, proclaimed for the edification of the devout, in order that their faith might be quickened.  Before we condemn the whole affair, we must realise two facts; one is that some of the most able minds of Greece, men who were otherwise by no means remarkable for their religious faith, believed implicitly in Epidauros and went there to be cured; and the other is that the miraculous action of the god was always supplemented by medicines, in which there may well have been some real value.

We are told too much rather than too little about this embassy to Epidauros, for the atmosphere of this third century is different from that of the early republic.  Greek literature was beginning to influence Rome, and those generations were being born who were to be the pioneers in Roman literature.  Thus Roman mythology was commencing along Greek lines and with Greek models, and one of the points where legend grew thickest and fastest is in this coming of Aesculapius.  The plain facts are evidently that the committee went to Epidauros, obtained the snake, brought it back safely to Rome, and established the sanctuary on the island in the Tiber, where a temple was built and dedicated January 1, B.C. 291.  Probably this was the first use to which the island had ever been put, and from this time dates the first bridge connecting it with the city; the other bridge, to the right bank, was much later.  The Romans had always considered the island a disadvantage rather than an advantage.  Even in legend it was cursed, for it sprang from the wheat of the Tarquins.  They had always desired to be cut off from it, and had always feared lest it might act as a means of approach for the enemy from the opposite bank.  The few real facts of Aesculapius’s coming grew into a romantic account of how, to the great surprise and terror of the sailors, the snake went of its own accord into the Roman ship; and how it stayed aboard until they reached Antium, and then suddenly swam ashore and coiled itself up in a sacred palm tree in the enclosure of the temple of Apollo there; and how, when they were in despair of ever getting it back again, it returned peaceably to them at the end of three days, and all went well on the journey to Ostia and up the Tiber until they were passing the island, when the snake went ashore to make its permanent home there.

It was a pretty fancy which at a later date formed the island into the likeness of a boat by building a prow and stem of travertine at either end, the traces of which may still be seen; and it is a curious instance of the many survivals of ancient Rome in the modern city, that the Hospital of S. Bartolommeo stands on the site of the old Aesculapius sanctuary, and so far as we can tell, twenty-two centuries of suffering humanity have had the burden of their pain lightened there, in uninterrupted succession since that new year’s day, above three hundred years before Christ, when the hospital of Aesculapius of Epidauros was formally opened.