Asklepios (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World)

By the end of the fifth century BC, Asklepios was established and flourishing as the main healing deity of the Greeks. However, just a few centuries earlier, he featured in the Iliad as a mortal doctor, not a god. The Greeks had to wait until the classical period before they could seek individual, divine assistance for illnesses and pain, and Asklepios examines the way in which the god fulfilled this role. Asklepios had very little interaction with other gods and heroes; he is largely devoid of myth: he came too late to be incorporated into the great epics, or to take on the attributes and conquests of local hero divinities such as Herakles – his focus was on the world of mortals. His was the most ‘personal’ of all Greek cults, and he was the one and only god who routinely had an individual relationship with his worshippers. In no other cult was an epiphany of the god sought as a regular and intrinsic but most importantly essential part of the god’s worship. In this volume, Matthew Dillon explores the literary, epigraphic and iconographic evidence for Asklepios, providing a comprehensive analysis of this material, and explicates the ritual of the cult. But, more importantly, he reconstructs how his worshippers viewed their relationship with this god, examining the nature of the healing experience, what benefits worshippers believed they gained from involvement in his cult, and what was the nature of the healing process they claimed to experience at his hands. This is the definitive work on Asklepios, accessible to both scholars and undergraduate students of Greek religion.