CURE AND CULT IN ANCIENTH CORINTH

Asklepios, like other immortals, regarded death as contamination, so that no one was permitted to die in a sacred place. If the god of medicine avoided association with death, so in their way did human practitioners, as may be seen from Hippokrates' summary definition of the art of medicine (De arte iii): "the deliverance of the sick from pain, the reduction of diseases' violence, and the refusal to treat those overpowered by their diseases, with the knowledge that medical art is unavailing in these cases."

Indeed perhaps it was often the case that where human skill had been of no avail the patient turned to the god. The orator Aischines testifies to something such in these verses (Palatine Anthology vi.330):

    Despairing of human skill but with all hope in the divine, 

     Leaving Athens, blessed in her sons, and coming to your grove, 

     Asklepios, I was cured in three months of a wound 

     In the head that had lasted for a whole year. 

Corinth's Asklepieion is only one of a great many temples to the Divine Physician. Although Corinth has anatomical dedications not found in equal numbers elsewhere and a clear ground plan of both shrine and neighboring fountain the fullest picture of Asklepios' activities requires the importation of literary and epigraphical material from Athens, of inscribed testimonials to the god's power from Asklepieia in Epidauros and Lebena, Crete, and of reliefs from Athens and Piraeus.

For an ailing worshipper in pursuit of a cure, a bath in the sea served as the outward symbol of the inner state prescribed at Epidauros (Porphyrius, De abstinentia ii.19): "Going into the fragrant temple, one must be pure; purity is thinking holy thoughts." Then came the offering of honey cakes at the altar. At Corinth the arrangements suggest that in addition to a sea bath the patient made token ablutions at the eastern water basin, proceeded to both altar and temple and then to the lustral area for proper cleansing before entering the main hall of the abaton or inner sanctum. There the patient lay down on a pallet on the floor, and presently an attendant put out the lights and urged sleep and silence. Then in the patient's dream the god came with an attendant carrying mortar, pestle and medicine chest, mixing a potion, applying a plaster, using the knife or summoning a sacred serpent to lick the afflicted part. If the dream was suggested by an actual priest making his rounds, the cure to which the patient attested on waking was still a thing worthy of wonder and thankfulness.  It is from such expressions of thankfulness that there has come down to us the most vivid evidence of the treatment undergone and the cures effected. Corinthian terracotta models of...anatomical bits and pieces that were healed...illustrate the "case histories" recorded at Epidauros and elsewhere. The accumulated mass of life size votive limbs and organs found in the Asklepieion precinct amounted to some ten cubic meters and included examples of almost all parts of the  body: legs, feet, arms, hands, ears and eyes, torsos, heads, female breasts and reproductive organs, and male genitalia.

Votives were found of two complete heads of women and four fragmentary heads of men. As with most other pieces, there is no indication of the particular ailment, since it is likely that shops sold them ready made, but headaches would in any case have been difficult to depict. One such sufferer was treated at Epidauros (I.G., IV2, 1.122): "Hagestratos: headache. He being oppressed by insomnia because of headache, when he was in the abaton, slept and saw a dream. The god seemed, after curing the pain in his head and standing him up naked, to teach him the attack used in the pancration. When day came he went out well and not much later won the pancration at Nemea."
Even more raculous is the case of Heraieus of Mytilene: "He did not have hair on his head, but a great deal on his chin. Being ashamed because he was laughed at by others, he slept in the shrine. And the god, anointing his head with a drug, made him grow hair" (I.G., IV2, 1.121).

Only three eyes were found in this large collection of votives. This scarcity is surprising in view of  the Epidauros cure records, where blindness or other eye disease is most often attested. These are typical examples.

"There came as a suppliant to the god a man who was so one eyed that the other had only lids in which there was nothing, but they were completely empty. Certain people in the temple laughed at his simplicity in thinking that he would see with an eye that was not there. Then a vision appeared to him as he slept; the god seemed to boil some medicine and, drawing apart the lids, to pour it in. When day came, he went out seeing with both eyes" (I.G., IV2, 1.121). "Ambrosia from Athens, blind of one eye. She came as a suppliant to the god. Going around the shrine she mocked at some of the cures as incredible and impossible, if the lame and blind became whole by having a dream. But when she slept in the shrine the god, standing over her, seemed to say that he would cure her but that he would require her to give to the temple a silver pig as a memorial of her unbelief. Saying this, he cut open her diseased eye and poured in a drug. When day came she went away cured" (I.G., IV2, 1.121).

In a virtually machineless society both hands and feet had to suffer the wear and tear of production and locomotion, so that it is not perhaps surprising that these are among the most numerous dedications. And here for the first time we have a terracotta model with a particular abnormality plainly depicted: one hand with a kind of growth or abscess. It may be that this satisfied patient went to the expense of giving the coroplast a special order, or this kind of growth may have been a sufficiently common complaint for the shops to have such models already made up.  Perhaps comparable is a certain Cretan woman who "thanks Asklepios the Savior, having got a severe ulceration on her little finger and being cured when the god ordered her to apply an oyster shell  burnt and powdered with rose salve and to anoint it with mallow mixed with olive. oil. And so he cured her" (Insc. Cret., I,  xvii.19).

Foot trouble was obviously of various kinds. One visitor to the Asklepieion at Athens concluded his prayer of thanks thus: "Three times blessed Paion Asklepios, I, Diophantos, was healed by your art of a painful, incurable would; no longer do I appear crab footed or as walking on sharp thorns but quick of step, just as you promised" (I.G., II2, 4514).

EXCERPTS FROM "CURE AND CULT IN ANCIENT CORINTH: A GUIDE TO THE ASKLEPIEION", AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS, PRINCETON, 1977 . Apud Federico Garcia Morales  in: http://www.indiana.edu/ . Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.