Pim Schievink

Continuity at the sanctuary of Asklepios in Epidauros. Exploring ideas of decline after 146 BC

After Rome defeated the Achaean League in 146 BC, Rome’s interactions in Greece changed, with more direct contact with Greek poleis and their sanctuaries. For Epidauros, a polis in the Argolid with a famous sanctuary to Asklepios, it has been argued that this was a period of decline. The sanctuary was in decay, according to some scholars, until the second century AD, when it was saved from decline with the intervention of the emperor Hadrian. This article argues for continuity in cult practice and significant activity in the first centuries BC and AD, without ignoring the evidence commonly presented for decline. It thereby offers a more nuanced picture of the Epidaurian Asklepieion in this period.

Snakes and Asklepios: the role of stories of migrating snakes.
Epidauros and its sanctuary of the healing god Asklepios was home to snakes. These snakes were tame and considered sacred to the god and embodied Asklepios in certain moments as well. When the cult of Asklepios spread from Epidauros to other cities, one of the ways in which he moved was as a snake. This became a (semi-) mythological trope of cultic transfer.

The spread of Asklepios to other sanctuaries has been widely discussed. Most discussions, however, focus on the specific reasoning behind the import of the god Asklepios at that specific point in time and sometimes are used as evidence for similarities in practices. While discussions on the reasoning behind the import are fruitful and overarching similarities between sanctuaries were (sometimes) there, I want to specifically focus on the importance of the stories about the migration of Asklepios to other poleis themselves: What can we gain from closereading the narratives of travelling snakes themselves and what roles did they serve?

One of the most important aspects to take from these stories is that they create a shared history between different sites. Thus, communities were created through myth and snakes. This works on different scales, but also in different times. The narratives reflect on the past, are important in the present (the time when they were retold) and are a lasting monument for the future. However, even when there was an Epidaurian connection, not all sanctuaries copied everything. Choice in what to adapt and what not to adapt is reflected in some stories and is of great importance

Sanctuaries of Asklepios are well-known as centres of healing that gained momentum in the Hellenistic world. The shrines and their material culture provide excellent examples of 'private' religious practices. Yet even these practices and the objects they produced occurred in the highly public environment. This is especially relevant for sanctuaries that became important urban spaces, such as the Asklepieia of Epidauros and Pergamon-despite their location outside the urban core. These spaces became urban microcosms that produced a wide variety of ritual practices and objects, operating at varying scales simultaneously and with the potential of communicating to a wide and varied audience over time. Particularly rich are the objects that are related to the familial sphere that were placed in these sanctuaries. Families, local elites but also others, invested according to their means to make themselves and their lineage particularly visible within sacred space by erecting statues, accompanied by inscriptions. Whilst the motivation is not often transmitted, they were certainly meant to impact later viewers. Their content could be varied: some are directed at one generation (either to children, to parents or to siblings of the dedicants), others span several decades. This paper focuses on the agencies of these objects at Asklepieia and their capacity to generate a long-term family and polis narrative that spoke to later generations. Taken together, they created a temporal assemblage that afforded a sense of deep time, weaving together city, family and the divine. Using case studies drawn from Asklepieia as at Epidauros and Pergamon, this paper thus examines ways that family-related (votive) objects traveled through time to create narratives of meaning and belonging between the urban communities and Asklepios at the (often rural) shrine. We argue that erecting these monuments in a sacred and urban microcosm effectively produced a timescape that would have been of vital importance to the legitimacy, authority and social histories of family, sanctuary and city.