Artemis Brod (Independent Scholar)
This paper uses a close reading of Aelius Aristides’ Oration 39 (Regarding the Well in the Temple of Asclepius) to reveal an affect of distributed haptics at work at the Pergamenian Asklepieion. Asclepius was a divine practitioner of medicine and doctors, as Alex Purves has noted (2018:5), diagnosed and treated patients by touch. Aristides’ Oration 39—On the Sacred Well—demonstrates that touch was at the heart of the healing agency of the god and that this agency was distributed throughout the temple site. In this fascinating and understudied oration, these distributed haptics coalesce at the Well, which reflects these various encounters, activities, and representations.
In the oration, Aristides argues that the Well is special because it is meant to be used (39.1, 39.17) and he enumerates its different uses at various points (39.1, 39.12, 39.15). These range from bathing and drinking to drawing its waters and watching others interact with it. At the very end of the speech, he asserts that the well works through touch (ψαύειν) (39.17). In one simile, Aristides compares the relationship between the Well and Asclepius to doctors and their enslaved coworkers as they perform on a patient (39.11). Elsewhere, he describes the therapeutic efficacy of watching someone as they reach out and wash their hands (τὴν χεῖρα προτείνας ἀπονιψάμενος) (39.13).
In his capacity as a doctor, Asclepius appeared in dreams and had various forms of contact with his patients. He massaged them, applied ointments, poured medicines, touched them, performed surgery, kissed them (and so on). In the Hieroi Logoi, Aristides describes various forms of contact (47.71, 48.32, 49.47 (of Sarapis)). In addition, Asclepius, as a savior god, is imagined in a more metaphorical capacity, as reaching his hand out to his devotees (Hippocrates Epistles 15 (=E&E, T448); Suidas Lexicon, s.v. Theopompus (=E&E, T456)). At the temple, anatomical votive figures displayed on walls and inscriptions would have testified to these forms and places of contact.
While scholars have noted the importance of the sensory experience at the temple (multisensory: Panagiotidou, 2016: 101; visual: Petsalis-Diomidis, 2007) and the importance of touch in the medical world (Purves 2018, Flemming 2018), they have not to my knowledge emphasized the affective experience of touch at the Asklepieion. I argue that the god’s presence was especially haptic in nature. While they were awake and shared the communal, outdoor space of the temenos, the god touched his devotees via the Sacred Well. This communal touch would have preceded and activated the god’s touch during incubation, when each patient occupied a private dreamworld. It is no wonder that, after describing a dream in which he and the poet Metrodorus discuss what it was like to approach the well, drink from it, watch others drink from it and look upon it, Aristides writes, “I dreamed that I discussed these things … and that I happened to have heard that if I should be in the god’s hands (ἐν χερσὶ τοῦ θεοῦ), there would be hope” (47.42, trans. Behr).