thank-offerings of centuries of a tasteful devotion, being really
also a kind of hospitals for the sick, administered in a full
conviction of the religiousness, the refined and sacred happiness, of
a life spent in the relieving of pain.

Elements of a really experimental and progressive knowledge there
were doubtless amid this devout enthusiasm, bent so faithfully on the
reception of health as a direct gift from God; but for the most part
his care was held to take [29] effect through a machinery easily
capable of misuse for purposes of religious fraud. Through dreams,
above all, inspired by Aesculapius himself, information as to the
cause and cure of a malady was supposed to come to the sufferer, in a
belief based on the truth that dreams do sometimes, for those who
watch them carefully, give many hints concerning the conditions of
the body--those latent weak points at which disease or death may most
easily break into it. In the time of Marcus Aurelius these medical
dreams had become more than ever a fashionable caprice. Aristeides,
the "Orator," a man of undoubted intellectual power, has devoted six
discourses to their interpretation; the really scientific Galen has
recorded how beneficently they had intervened in his own case, at
certain turning-points of life; and a belief in them was one of the
frailties of the wise emperor himself. Partly for the sake of these
dreams, living ministers of the god, more likely to come to one in
his actual dwelling-place than elsewhere, it was almost a necessity
that the patient should sleep one or more nights within the precincts
of a temple consecrated to his service, during which time he must
observe certain rules prescribed by the priests.

For this purpose, after devoutly saluting the Lares, as was customary
before starting on a journey, Marius set forth one summer morning on