The Temple of Asclepius at Aegae Destroyed

For there was a widespread error among these pretenders to wisdom concerning the demon worshiped in Cilicia. Thousands revered him as possessing saving and healing power; he sometimes appeared to those who spent the night in his temple, and sometimes restored the sick to health. Yet on the contrary he was a destroyer of souls, who drew his easily deceived worshipers away from the true Savior to entangle them in ungodly error. So the emperor, in keeping with his practice and his desire to advance the worship of him who is both a jealous God and the true Savior, ordered that this temple too be razed to the ground. In prompt obedience to this command, a band of soldiers laid this building, the admiration of noble philosophers, flat in the dust, together with its unseen occupant: neither demon nor god, but rather a deceiver of souls, who had led mankind astray for so long through many ages. And so he who had promised others deliverance from misfortune and distress could find no means to save himself, any more than when, as the myth tells, he was scorched by the stroke of lightning. Our emperor’s devout deeds, however, had nothing of myth or pretense in them. By the manifest power of his Savior this temple, like the others, was so utterly overthrown that not a trace of the former follies was left behind. [a]