Æsculapius left two sons, who continued their father’s profession,
and three or four daughters. It is not possible to be chronologically
exact with these semi-mythical personages, but according to the usual
reckoning Æsculapius lived about 1250 B.C. He would have been
contemporary with Gideon, a judge of Israel, about two centuries after
the death of Moses, and two centuries before the reign of King David.
His sons Machaon and Podalirus were immortalised in the Iliad among the
Greek heroes who fought before Troy, and they exercised their surgical
and medical skill on their comrades, as Homer relates. When Menelaus
was wounded by an arrow shot by Pandarus, Machaon was sent for, and
“sucked the blood, and sovereign balm infused, which Chiron gave, and
Æsculapius used.”
After the Trojan war both the brothers continued to exercise their art,
and some of their cures are recorded. Their sons after them likewise
practised medicine, and the earliest Æsculapian Temple is believed to
have been erected in memory of his grandfather by Spyrus, the second
son of Machaon, at Argos. Perhaps he only intended it as a home for
patients, or it may have been as an advertisement. From then, however,
the worship of Æsculapius spread, and we read of temples at Titane in
the Peloponnesus, at Tricca in Thessalia, at Trithorea, at Corinth,
at Epidaurus, at Cos, at Megalopolis in Arcadia, at Lar in Laconia,
at Drepher, at Drope, at Corona on the Gulf of Messina, at Egrum, at
Delos, at Cyllene, at Smyrna, and at Pergamos in Asia Minor. The Temple
of Epidaurus was for a long time the most important, but before the
time of Hippocrates that of Cos seems to have taken the lead.