Sanctuarium Aesculapii Epidauri
About
The most famous healing sanctuary in the Greek world, where the sick slept in a colonnaded hall hoping Asklepios himself would appear in a dream and cure them. Its Doric temple, built around 375 BCE, stood beside inscribed stone tablets recording hundreds of claimed miracle cures, from blindness to tapeworms. Roman patrons and physicians alike sent gifts and visits to the sanctuary under the empire. In 117 CE pilgrims from across the Roman world still queued for a night in Asklepios's dormitory.
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 2.27
The sacred grove with its boundary marks, the rule that no one may be born or die inside it, and the slabs recording who was healed and of what.
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 →