Were it not authenticated by the most undeniable testimonies, it would appear incredible that the impostures of the disciples of Aesculapius, and the common faith in his regenerative powers, should have survived with equal potency and acceptation during the ages immediately succeeding the Christian era. It must not however, be forgotten, that these were the times also, when an infinity of superstitious of every description disgraced the Roman world; although it would have appeared a necessary consequence, that their prevalency should have been checked by the increasing determination of learning and science.
If at this period the number of dreaming patients had fallen off at Cos and Epidaurus, the deficiency was amply compensated by the growing popularity of Aesculapius's shrines at Rome, Pergamus, Alaea, Mallos, and other places, where the ancient rituals were faithfully preserved. The highest magistrates in the Roman states not only countenanced, but patronised the superstition; Marcus Aurelius, by the friendship with which he honoured the Paphlagonian imposter Alexander, and Caracalla, by the journey he undertook to Pergamus, to obtain the cure of a disease which inflicted him. This Alexander, the Cagliostro of his age, whose memoirs have been handed down to us by Lucian, made shift to father a new species of juggling upon the ancient process of incubation: for he pretends that it was necessary for him to sleep for a night in the sealed scrips which contain the queries he was to have resolved for those who visited his oracle.[107] During this interval he dexterously opened the scrips, and sealed them up again; pretending that the responses which he delivered to the querists in the morning, had been revealed to him by the deity in a dream.
The priests of Aesculapius possessed a never failing source of information on the recipes or votive tablets with which these temples abounded. These were sometimes engraven on pillars, as at Epidaurus; of which Pausanias says there were six remaining in his time, and besides these, one in particular removed from the rest, on which it was recorded that Hippolytus had sacrificed twenty horses, in return for his having been restored to life by him. Five memorials only of this kind have reached the present age. One of them is to be found in the beginning of Galen's fifth book de Compos, medic.: it is taken from the temple of Phthas, near Memphis, and is the least interesting of the whole. Its subject is the use of the Diktamnus, borrowed from Heras of Cappadocia, a medical writer, frequently quoted by Galen. The remaining four are much more important: they were engraven on a marble slab,[108] of later date at Rome, and are thought, with much probability, to have belonged to the Aesculapian temple in the Insula Tiberina. The present translation, in which some errors either of the artist or copyist are rectified, is extracted from the first volume of Gruter's Corp. Inscriptionum. The narrations are perspicuous and laconic.