.jpg?width=800)
Asclepieum Corinthi
About
Healing sanctuary at the north edge of Corinth, built beside a spring that patients believed carried curative power. Excavators recovered hundreds of terracotta votives shaped like the body parts pilgrims hoped to heal, from hands to organs. Its four-columned temple, late 4th century BCE, was rebuilt after an earthquake and stood alongside dining rooms for patients. Corinth, refounded as a Roman colony in 44 BCE, still kept the Asklepieion running when Trajan died in 117.
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.
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 →