ABSTRACT
The name Aesculapius is a Latin form of Asklepios, an early Greek physician who by the fifth century BC was worshiped as the god of medicine. He is the ‘farre renowmed sonne/Of great Apollo,’ god of the healing sun, and the mortal Coronis (see FQ I v 3644). Following Boccaccio (Genealogia 7.36), Spenser makes him a brother of Tryphon, ‘soveraine leach’ and ‘surgeon’ of the sea gods, and father of Podalyrius (III iv 43, IV xi 6, VI vi I). Aesculapius was reared by Chiron, a centaur, from whom he learned the art of medicine (see Pindar Pythian Odes 3, Ovid Metamorphoses 2.630). The most famous temple in his honor, surrounded by sanatoria, was at Epidaurus. While stories developed of his miraculous cures, most early accounts suggest that his medical priests’ methods of therapy were chiefly scientific and natural, though with occasional recourse to music, as was customary in Greece and Rome. Statues and Roman coins usually present him as a kindly bearded figure holding a caduceus, or staff, around which is wound a sacred snake, symbol both of wisdom and of rejuvenation since it sloughs its skin. Cooper writes that he is ‘honoured in the fourme of a serpent’ (Thesaurus 1565; see also Cartari 1571:84-90). Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes includes his portrait (1586:212).
