The Cures at Epidaurus

The sick arrive and find earlier cures in stone

Epidaurus was the chief sanctuary, or sacred precinct, of Asclepius, the god of medicine. The sick came there to be healed. A visitor seeking a cure entered an enclosure where earlier cures were already on display. The travel writer Pausanias saw upright slabs there. Six remained in his day, and more had stood before. They listed men and women whom the god had healed. Each record named a disease and the means of cure. The inscriptions were in Doric, the local dialect of the Argolid. So the sanctuary presented healing as more than private relief. It was a local record that grew over time.

Pausanias does not copy out the single cases on the slabs. His short description should not be stretched into a full medical procedure. What it does show is choice and display. The people who ran the sanctuary kept named results where later visitors seeking help could see them. So every new arrival met an argument made from earlier patients: this god had acted here before.

The boundary keeps out birth and death

The sacred grove was marked out on every side. Two ordinary events of human life could not cross its line. Nobody was allowed to give birth or to die inside. Pausanias notes similar rules on the island of Delos and at Titane, so the ban cannot be treated as unique to Epidaurus. It kept pollution, a state of religious uncleanness, and permanent changes of the body outside ground set apart for the god’s healing.

Food followed the same rule of bounds. Every offering had to be consumed entirely within the sanctuary, whether a person of Epidaurus or a stranger brought it. Nothing offered to Asclepius could go back into ordinary use. The worshipper came in, ate and left. The gift did not leave with them.

Asclepius with the serpent and the dog

At the centre stood the cult image, the main statue of the god, made of ivory and gold. An inscription named its maker as Thrasymedes of Paros. Pausanias gives its size as half that of the Olympian Zeus at Athens. Asclepius sits holding a staff. His other hand is above the head of a serpent, and a dog lies beside him. Carved scenes of heroes from Argos covered his seat.

The description does not allow us to give each animal or gesture an exact role in healing. It does show what a visitor seeking help faced. There was a huge statue of the god, its maker named on it, with creatures already part of the way he was shown. People sought healing in front of a statue that made the god’s attention present in the room.

The Tholos and what survives

Near the temple stood the Tholos, a round building of white marble that Pausanias calls worth seeing. Inside were two paintings by Pausias of Sicyon. In one, Love holds a lyre in place of his bow and arrows. The other shows Drunkenness drinking from a crystal cup. It is painted so that the viewer sees both the cup and a woman’s face through it. Pausanias records art, not a treatment. He does not link either image to a cure.

That silence helps define what survives. The slabs record healed bodies. The boundary rules govern birth, death and offerings. The statue fixes Asclepius at the centre of the sanctuary. The Tholos keeps images whose use in ritual Pausanias does not explain. Epidaurus gives no single, complete method of cure. It gives a controlled place in which hope was made public. The last thing a patient could remember was a stone bearing another person’s name, disease and recovery from it.