Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (351 page)

put up votive tablets. In A.D. 165 the Greek writer Pausanias from Magnesia in Asia Minor stood before the ruins of Epidaurus. In the second volume of his descriptions of Greece (Periegeses tes Hellados), he observed:

In olden times there were even more inscribed plaques within the enclosure of the sanctuary than there are today. Now there are only six left. On them are recorded the names of men and women who were cured by Asclepios, and also the diseases which each of them suffered from, and how they; were cured.

The tablets are written in the Doric language.

During excavations at Epidaurus in 1928 these six stone: tablets were found, with the following messages of thanks:

Ambrosia of Athens, one-eyed. Came to intercede with the god. When she walked about the sanctuary, she laughed at some of the cares and thought it impossible that lame and blind people could become healthy when they had only a dream. After she had slept in the cure room, she came out cured.

Euhippos has had a lance point in his jaw for six years and slept in the cure room. ... When day broke, he came out cured, with the lance point in his hands.

Hermodikos of Lampsakos, crippled in body. Asclepios healed him when he slept in the cure room and ordered him when he came out to bring the biggest stone he could find to the sanctuary. Then he brought the stone that now lies in front of the sanctuary.

Alketas of Halieis.He was blind and slept in the sanctuary. When day broke, he came out cured.

Arate of Laconia, dropsical. Her mother slept for her, while she herself was in Lacedaemon, and had a dream. ... When she returned to Lacedaemon, she found her daughter cured; she had had the same dream.

Aristokritos to Halieis. He had swum out to sea and while diving reached a place from which there was no way out. So his father, as he could not find his son anywhere, slept in the cure room of Asclepios....

When he came out of the room ... he found the boy on the seventh day.

The people who were miraculously cured 500 years B.C. behaved just the same as their counterparts today, and even the miracles were of the same quality as today, although the Christian guardians of

'genuine' miracles are not at all keen to hear that. The god Asclepios does not stand alone as the chief witness for pre-Christian miraculous cures; he is in illustrious company.

It is occasionally forgotten that Apollo was not only the god of radiant youth, poetry and music, but also the god of medicine and soothsaying ... and the son of Asclepios. So he had been well trained.

Apollo was a venerated god of healing, to whom a temple was erected in the sanctuary of Delphi in the eighth century B.C. Naturally miracles happened in it. The dumb learnt to speak. Kidney-stones disappeared through the ureter in a mysteriously natural way. Shiny-headed Greeks prayed and hair grew luxuriantly on their pates[25]. (A clever speculator told me that after the invention of knitting needles and the zip fastener, there was only one invention left that could make anyone a millionaire - a