Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: The cult of the Greek healing god Asklepios was one of the most \npopular cults in all of antiquity. Over the course of a millennium beginning in \nthe 5th c. BC, sanctuaries of Asklepios spanned the Greco-Roman world and \nattracted countless individuals in search of cures. \nScholars have long studied the cult in accordance with dichotomies like \nrational vs. irrational and public vs. private. These dichotomies are not only \nmisleading when applied to Asklepios-cult, pitting it against “rational” Greek \nmedicine and placing it beyond the political interests of the state, but have \ndriven the cult into interpretive gridlock. Consequently, fundamental \nquestions about the cult’s development remain unanswered. \nThis study begins by exploring why the cult only arose in the 5th c. BC \ndespite the fact that Asklepios had been known as a healer since Homer. \nAdducing evidence from the Hippocratic corpus, I argue that developments \nin Greek medicine were critical to the rise of the cult in the 5th c. BC. As Greek \nmedicine began to define itself as a techne and to delimit its boundaries by \nspecifying the kinds of illnesses that it could and could not treat, it generated \na void in healing. The god Asklepios, whose mythology portrayed him as a \ntrained physician, was ideal for filling the void left by mortal medicine. \nSince translocal factors alone fail to explain the spread of Asklepioscult, \nthis study next examines local factors that motivated Athens and Rome, \ntwo of antiquity’s best-documented cities, to import Asklepios. Analysis of \nthe placement of the cult within both the topography of Athens and the \nAthenian civic calendar, indicates that Athens’ immediate motivation for \nimporting Asklepios in 420 BC was not plague (as many have argued) but \nimperial ambitions in the context of the Peloponnesian War. \nSimilarly, examination of ancient sources for the cult’s importation to \nRome, as well as of the topography of the area surrounding Aesculapius’ \nsanctuary there, demonstrates that Rome imported Aesculapius ca. 291 BC \nnot because of a literal plague, but in response to a metaphorical plague \nmanifest in the Samnite Wars, Demetrios Poliorketes, and the patricianplebeian \nstruggle.
Author: Bronwen L. Wickkiser
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W132251174