probably very slowly. In Christian times
(cf. Ramsay above) Pagan temples were (about A.D. 408) utilized for
other purposes, including that of hospitality to strangers.

The sick.

Round the temples, at first probably village temples, the organization
of medical relief grew up. Primitive medicine is connected with dreams,
worship, and liturgical "pollution," punishment and penitence, and an
experimental practice. Finally, systematic observation and science (with
no knowledge of chemistry and little of physiology) assert themselves,
and a secular administration is created by the side of the older
religious organization.

Sickness among primitive races is conceived to be a material substance
to be extracted, or an evil spirit to be driven away by incantation.
Religion and medicine are thus at the beginning almost one and the
same thing. In Anatolia, in the groups of villages (cf. Ramsay as
above, i. 101) under the theocratic government of a central [Greek:
ieron] or temple, the god Men Karou was the physician and saviour
([Greek: soter] and [Greek: sozon]) of his people. Priests, prophets
and physicians were his ministers. He punished wrong-doing by diseases
which he taught the penitent to cure. So elsewhere pollution, physical
or moral, was chastened by disease and loss of property or children,
and further ills were avoided by sacrifice and expiation and public
warning. In the temple and out of this phase of thought grew up
schools of medicine, in whose practice dreams and religious ritual
retained a place. The newer gods, Asclepius and Apollo, succeeded the
older local divinities; and the "sons" of Asclepius became a
profession, and the temple with its adjacent buildings a kind of
hospital. There were many temples of Asclepius in Greece and
elsewhere, placed generally in high and salubrious positions. After
ablution the patient offered sacrifices, repeating himself the words
of the hymn that was chanted. Then, when night came on, he slept in
the temple. In the early dawn he was to dream "the heavenly dream"
which would suggest his cure; but if he did not dream, relations and
others--officials at the temple--might dream for him. At dawn the
priests or sons of Asclepius came into the temple and visited the
sick, so that, in a kind of drama, where reality and appearance seemed
to meet, the patients believed that they saw the god himself. The next
morning the