This study, an examination of the effect of the great plague of Athens on the Athenian imagination, will try to show that Jacob Bernays, the first great proponent of the medical interpretation of Aristotelian katharsis (and the uncle of Dr. Sigmund Freud's wife), himself stepped closer to a truth about Athenian tragedy than he had realized, because the Muses indeed sit quite close to the temple of Asclepius on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens. For, assuming Aristotle did visit the Theater of Dionysus in Athens to witness dramatic performances, an activity he subordinated to reading them as texts, a few steps, even a brief glance over his shoulder, would have taken him into the Athenian City Asklepieion, the shrine of the Greek god of healing (see Figure 1).