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.
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