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  • Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece: Between Craft and Cult
  • Brooke Holmes
Bronwen L. Wickkiser. Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece: Between Craft and Cult. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xiii + 178 pp. Ill. $55.00 (978-0-8018-8978-3).

For some years, scholars of Greek medicine have been steadily eroding the opposition between rational and irrational that was once a given of their field. Fueled by similar intellectual forces—anthropology and cultural studies—ancient historians [End Page 284] have shown that religion is so integrated into the ancient polis that it designates nothing so much as political life itself. In this polished monograph, Bronwen L. Wickkiser capitalizes on shifts in both fields to reconsider the rise of the cult of Asclepius in the later fifth century and, particularly, its arrival in Athens in 420/419 bce. In the first half of the book, she defends the claim that Asclepius owes his popularity to expectations generated—but not fulfilled—by the growing authority and confidence of fifth-century physicians. In the last three chapters, she argues that the importation of the cult to Athens from Epidaurus, far from being a private matter (as has long been believed), was overseen by the polis as a way of consolidating power in the Peloponnese in the uncertain months following the Peace of Nicias in 421.

The Edelsteins’ monumental two-volume work on Asclepius, first published in 1945,1 remains the point of departure for investigations of the cult, and Wickkiser’s study is no exception. She positions her work as a challenge to the contrast drawn by Ludwig Edelstein and others between the “irrational” cult and “rational” medicine, arguing that the two types of healing enjoyed a symbiotic relationship: those with conditions that physicians declined to treat would have become patients of the god, while the physicians gained in prestige by affiliating themselves with a divine patron. The claim that Asclepius was the physician of last resort is not new,2 though Wickkiser expresses it with greater confidence than others have and accumulates circumstantial evidence (observing, e.g., that many of the illnesses recorded from Epidaurus were chronic and thus presumably resistant to treatment). Secure evidence, nevertheless, is hard to come by, and the sources who report going to Asclepius only after trying physicians are nearly all too late to explain the growth of the cult in the late fifth and fourth centuries. It is possible to question further whether Asclepius’s success can be explained only through his assimilation to his human counterparts. Wickkiser argues—as Edelstein himself did—that the cures at Epidaurus conform to expectations created by contemporary medicine. Many cases, however, such as one in which a girl’s head is cut off to drain her body of excess fluid, suggest a logic of healing, together with a concept of disease, that does not simply exaggerate ideas and practices familiar from the medical texts but stands alongside them. And no doubt it would be valuable as well to approach the healing event in the cult on its own terms. Wickkiser, in fact, classifies some of the cult’s techniques as “supernatural” (p. 49). But without a fuller exploration of Asclepian difference, the label risks reinstating the divide that the book seeks to avoid.

The book’s incorporation of the growing body of material evidence for the cult more convincingly extends the Edelsteins’ work (which is largely restricted to textual sources). The implications of a broader perspective are greatest in the [End Page 285] final three chapters. Building on studies of the Athenian landscape as an imperial “text,” Wickkiser freshly appraises our best evidence for the importation of the cult—namely, the Telemachus monument—in order to embed the event in both the space of the city and the local dynamics of power. While her reconstruction of these dynamics and the importation itself is necessarily speculative and probably too tidy, it is a promising attempt to look beyond the plague that ravaged the city in the early 420s in order to understand why a young healing god found his way to the slopes of the Acropolis...

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