accumulated 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
his way to the famous temple which lay [30] among the hills beyond the
valley of the Arnus. It was his greatest adventure hitherto; and he
had much pleasure in all its details, in spite of his feverishness.
Starting early, under the guidance of an old serving-man who drove the
mules, with his wife who took all that was needful for their
refreshment on the way and for the offering at the shrine, they went,
under the genial heat, halting now and then to pluck certain flowers
seen for the first time on these high places, upwards, through a long
day of sunshine, while cliffs and woods sank gra