Asclepieum Pergami
About
Healing sanctuary built around a spring where patients drank sacred water, bathed, and walked a tunnel meant to carry them symbolically toward the god. Founded near 400 BCE, its earliest buildings were a modest temple of Asklepios Soter, a treatment hall, and a fountain house. The sprawling complex with theater and library that visitors picture today did not exist in 117 CE; that rebuild began only under Hadrian. The sanctuary was respected but still generations from its greatest fame.
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 →