Healing cult and incubation

What is attested

Across the Greek world from the late fifth century BC onwards, sanctuaries existed at which sick people slept overnight in a designated building in order to receive a dream from a healing god. The Greek sources use the verb — enkatheudein, enkoimasthai, to sleep in; incubation is the Latin-derived name used in modern scholarship. Asklepios is the deity most associated with it, at Epidauros, Athens, Corinth, Kos, Pergamon and Lebena among many others, but he was not alone: Amphiaraos at Oropos, Sarapis and Isis in Egypt and beyond, and later Christian saints all received sleepers seeking cures or answers; the descent-oracle of Trophonios at Lebadeia is usually grouped with them, though the rite Pausanias describes there — a descent into a chasm and a consultation — is not obviously the same thing.

The spread of the Asklepios cult is documented, not merely asserted. The Athenian sanctuary on the south slope of the Acropolis was founded in 420/19 BC by a private individual, Telemachos of Acharnai, and the foundation is recorded on the monument he set up — the so-called Telemachos monument (IG II³ 4 665 = IG II² 4960–4961), a relief-crowned stele that commemorates the god's arrival and the sanctuary's early years. This is unusually good evidence: a datable, near-contemporary inscription recording a specific cult transfer by a named man, rather than a later story about how a cult began.

Epidauros is the best-documented site, and the reason is a set of inscribed stelae recording cures. Pausanias, visiting in the second century AD, describes slabs standing within the enclosure, six remaining in his day though there had once been more, inscribed with the names of men and women healed by Asklepios, the ailment each had, and the manner of the cure. Two substantially preserved stelae of the later fourth century BC survive and are now in the site museum, catalogued as IG IV²,1 121 and 122; further fragmentary material and a later inscription of the imperial period belong with them. These texts, the iamata, contain roughly seventy short accounts. Every one of them is a claim published by the sanctuary about the god who owned the sanctuary. They are the sanctuary's own advertising in stone, and they must be read as such.

The physical apparatus of the practice is recoverable archaeologically. At Epidauros the abaton, the long portico in which sleepers lay, is identifiable on the ground, as are the temple, the altar, the round building whose function remains debated, and the guest accommodation. At Pergamon the Asklepieion received an extensive building programme in the second century AD including a round temple and a domed structure reached by an underground passage; the therapeutic function of that structure is an archaeological inference rather than a documented one. Votive deposits are the other great material class: at Corinth, excavation of the Asklepieion in the early 1930s recovered on the order of nine hundred terracotta anatomical votives — arms, legs, feet, hands, ears, eyes, breasts, genitals — from eight deposits, dedicated between roughly the last quarter of the fifth and the last quarter of the fourth century BC.

Regulation and cost are also attested directly. The sacred law from the Amphiareion at Oropos (IG VII 235) requires anyone coming to be healed by the god to pay a fee of not less than nine obols of good silver, deposited in the treasury in the presence of the temple warden, before undergoing incubation. This is documentary evidence of a sort the literary sources rarely supply: it shows a fixed minimum charge, an accounting mechanism, and a sanctuary official present at the transaction. A single sanctuary's rule at a single period cannot be generalised into a standard tariff for the Greek world, but it establishes that access to the god's dream was administered and paid for.

How the rite worked

At Oropos the fourth-century sacred law sets out a sequence: arrival, purification, payment of not less than nine obols into the treasury in the presence of the neokoros, and sacrifice. How far other sanctuaries, or the sanctuaries of Asklepios, followed the same order is not documented; site layout shows where such stages could have taken place, not that they did. Pausanias, writing centuries later, adds that the sleeper sacrificed a ram and lay down on its skin. The chronological gap matters: the fourth-century regulation appears more flexible about the preliminary sacrifice than Pausanias' later description implies, and the ram's-skin detail should be attributed to Pausanias' own period rather than assumed for the classical sanctuary.

The sleeper then entered the designated building — abaton at Epidauros, enkoimeterion elsewhere — and lay down for the night. What was supposed to happen is stated consistently across sources: the god appeared in a dream. In the Epidaurian accounts he sometimes operates directly, sometimes gives an instruction, and sometimes his sacred animals act — snakes and dogs licking the afflicted part recur. Those accounts assume that a cured visitor owed the god payment, and several of them are stories about people who did not pay, or who mocked, and were dealt with accordingly; this is a sanctuary telling visitors what happens to defaulters, and reads as such. How reporting actually worked on waking, in what form and to whom, is not recorded.

Thanks was given materially, and the material survives. Anatomical votives in terracotta, marble or metal represent the healed part. Carved relief plaques show the god, the patient asleep, family members, and sometimes a snake at the sleeper's shoulder. Inscribed dedications name dedicants. Larger sanctuaries maintained treasuries and inventories. This is the mechanism by which a healing sanctuary accumulated a visible, cumulative display of claimed successes on site. That the display worked on arriving patients — surrounding them with evidence that the god delivered — is a modern inference about an effect no ancient source describes.

Personnel are less well documented than procedure. Sanctuaries had priests, temple wardens (neokoroi) and attendants; the Oropos law puts the warden at the treasury. What sanctuary staff did during the night, whether they were present in the sleeping hall, and what if anything they said or administered, is not recorded in any source that can be trusted on the point. Aelius Aristides, writing in the second century AD of his own long involvement with Asklepios at Pergamon, describes receiving prescriptions in dreams — including regimens, baths, purges and river-bathing in winter — and consulting sanctuary personnel and physicians about them, which indicates that dream instruction and medical practice coexisted rather than excluded one another. He is a single, atypical, highly self-conscious witness and cannot stand for ordinary patients.