Asclepieum Athenarum
About
Founded in 420/19 BCE on the Acropolis's south slope, after a priest smuggled the healing snake of Asklepios into Athens during a wartime plague. Its terrace held a temple, altar, sacred spring, and stoas where patients slept awaiting a healing dream, wedged between the Theatre of Dionysos and the Acropolis rock above. The sanctuary had run continuously for over five centuries by the time Trajan died in 117 CE. Its cure-tablets remain prime evidence for ancient medical practice.
What happened here
A healing sanctuary where the treatment is a night's sleep. Patients purify themselves, sacrifice, and then lie down in a long open hall to wait for a dream in which the god appears and either heals them or prescribes. In the morning the priests interpret. The prescriptions are practical as often as not — diet, exercise, cold baths, a walk — and there are doctors on site alongside the priests, with no sense that the two are in competition. Cured patients pay for a plaque recording what was wrong and what was done, and the walls fill with them; a model of the healed limb or organ is the cheaper option. Snakes and dogs live in the precinct and are part of the treatment.
In ancient writing
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.21.4
The sanctuary on the south slope of the Acropolis, with its spring and the statues of the god and his children.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →