Cos

Cos, one of the Sporades islands off the south-west tip of Asia Minor, opposite Halicarnassus, colonized by Dorians. It won fame in the Hellenistic age, in the fourth and third centuries BC, as a literary centre under the patronage of the Egyptian kings the Ptolemies, and was the home of the Greek poets Philetas and Theocritus. It was the birthplace of Hippocrates (fifth century BC), the father of Greek medicine and a member of a famous medical family in that island, reputedly descended from Asclepius.