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Temple of Aesculapius, Tiber Island
About
Rome dedicated this temple on January 1, 291 BCE, after sending a delegation to Epidaurus during a plague to fetch the healing god Aesculapius in the form of a sacred serpent. Tradition holds that the snake slipped off the returning ship as it passed the Tiber, swam to the island, and marked the very spot where the temple was to rise. Builders faced the island's downstream end in travertine to resemble a ship's prow, carving into the stone a relief of the healing serpent that still survives today. Sick Romans slept inside the sanctuary seeking a healing dream from the god, a practice imported directly from the Greek asklepieia, and in 47 CE the emperor Claudius decreed that any slave abandoned there by an owner unwilling to nurse them became free, since the island had become synonymous with cure.
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
Nearby
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