This paper compares the cases of female ailments recorded in the Epidaurian Miracles Cures with the theory and therapeutics of the Hippocratic gynecological texts as a means of testing the extent of the assumptions shared between temple and Hippocratic medicine. I argue that where temple and Hippocratic practice hold common ground, it is readily explicable through widely circulating and historically rooted cultural presuppositions regarding female physiology and pathology, rather than through scientific borrowings. Rather than representing complementary outlets of medical (...) care in which Asklepios specialized in “hopeless” cases, I suggest that the iamata permit us to observe a process in which parallel medical traditions branched out from a common cultural substratum, and that more nuance is required in framing the relationship between Greek naturalist and religious medicine. (shrink)

This paper analyses the cause of disease as perceived in Classical and Hellenistic Greece, and in particular in the iamata of Epidauros, cure inscriptions collected and set up in the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros in 350 BC, some of which date back to c. 450 BC. It is concluded that the iamata reflect a plurality of explanations of disease that co-existed in ancient Greece and complemented each other.

Based on ancient written sources, the famous monument of Telemachos, and excavation data, the article proposes a new reconstruction of the arrival of Asklepios’ cult in Athens. Two simultaneous foundations of cults of the Epidaurian Asklepios in Athens are reconstructed, which in all probability go back to the same initiative in the last quarter of the fifth century BCE. A completely new sanctuary for the god from Epidauros was created on the South Slope of the Acropolis (Telemachos), while an (...) old Athenian sanctuary, that of Amynos, opened its doors to welcome Asklepios (Sophokles). With respect to the three festivals of Asklepios in Athens, the article proposes that the oldest, the Epidauria, should be connected with the worship of Asklepios in the sanctuary of Amynos. The Asklepieia appear in the epigraphic sources much later and were perhaps part of the program of Lykourgos; they should be connected to the City Asklepieion. The third festival, the Heroa, was the last to be created in the second half of the second century BCE. The article proposes two alternative hypotheses, the traditional one that sees in the Heroa a celebration in honor of the hero Asklepios and a new one that treats the Heroa as a festival in honor of the heroized Sophokles (probably together with Asklepios). (shrink)

Stigmata and grammata in the accounts of miraculous cures at Epidauros. A new semantic and clinical analysis The accounts of miraculous cures at Epidauros have been the object of many interpretations and have led to numerous speculations concerning the pathologies described therein. Thus, up to the present, the termes and were interpreted especially as tattoos of fugitive slaves. By placing the words in a medical context, and through a double semantic and pathological analysis, it has been possible to propose a (...) retrospective diagnosis of the ailment afflicting two patients of the god Asklepios. The place of this account among the iamata is once again fully justified. (shrink)