Tholos Epidauri
About
Enigmatic round building designed by Polykleitos the Younger around 360 BCE, its foundations concealing a spiral maze of six concentric walls that no surviving ancient text explains. Doric columns encircled the outside and Corinthian columns lined an inner ring, one of the earliest uses of that order anywhere in Greek architecture. Snakes, sacred to Asklepios, were kept in the maze below the floor. The Tholos still stood within the healing sanctuary when Trajan died in 117 CE.
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 2.27.3
A round building of white marble by Polykleitos, worth going to see for the painting of Drunkenness drinking from a glass cup.
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 →