Hygeia

Hygeia, the Roman Salus, is the goddess of health and well-being — daughter and companion of Asclepius, with whom she shared the healing shrines. Where her father cures disease, Hygeia preserves and maintains health, the harmonious balance of the body; her name lives on in our word 'hygiene'.

The philosophers often took bodily health as the very image of the soul's well-being: for Plato, justice in the soul — the right rule of its parts — is precisely a kind of health, and virtue the soul's own flourishing. To honour Hygeia was thus, for the thoughtful, to honour the harmony of the whole person.