ORDER OPHIDIA. 309 



was considered as a lively image of that soft and persuasive, 

 but too often hypocritical eloquence, which " can make the 

 worse appear the better reason." Thus this animal was 

 placed on the caduceus of Mercury, in the Heathen, and in 

 the Christian mythology, became the symbol of the grand 

 original tempter of mankind. As remorse penetrates and 

 glides into the heart of the criminal to torment him, the 

 Greeks by another ingenious fable have changed into ser- 

 pents the hair, and the scourges, of the revenging Eume- 

 nides. The serpent Python, born from the slime of the 

 Deluge of Deucalion, and killed by Apollo, is an allegory 

 of the contagion, which is developed from marshes and 

 stagnant waters, and again annihilated by the heat of 

 the sun, as in Egypt the pestilence is observed to cease 

 during the summer solstice. The serpent which lacerates 

 the heart of Envy, or arms the bloody hand of Discord, is 

 in the same manner only an ingenious truth masked beneath 

 the charm of fiction. 



Similar mysterious applications which appear to have pre- 

 ceded the heroic ages, which have furnished to poetry so 

 many brilliant metaphors to enrich the literature of Greece 

 and Italy, though altered by ignorance, embellished by 

 imagination, and falsified by superstition and by fear, prove 

 that the ancients were very well acquainted with the manners 

 of the serpent tribe. Thus they surrounded the wand of 

 Esculapius with one of these reptiles, and the god himself 

 was adored at Epidaurus under the form of a serpent. 

 Another was consecrated to Hygeia, the goddess of health, to 

 show that temperance was the source of lengthened life ; and 

 the mirror of the divinity of Prudence was adorned with ser- 

 pents, as symbolical of intelligence, foresight, and divination. 



Subsequently, from motives of a very different nature, 

 and doubtless from the extreme terror inspired by these 

 animals, many nations have elevated them to the rank of gods. 



