Aelius Aristides

← Encyclopedia

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus (c. 117 – c. 181 CE) was a Greek rhetorician of the Second Sophistic, the period when public oratory carried the prestige of the eastern Roman provinces. He left a large body of polished speeches, and on those alone he would rank among the accomplished orators of his age. He is remembered instead for a stranger book: the Hieroi Logoi, the Sacred Tales, a first-person account of chronic illness and the long course of treatment he believed the god Asclepius prescribed to him in dreams.

He was born on 26 November 117 CE at Hadrianoutherae, a town of Mysia in the hinterland of the province of Asia, into a wealthy landowning family of the provincial Greco-Roman elite. The education marked out for such a man was the itinerant grammar of the sophistic schools: rhetoric at Smyrna under Alexander of Cotiaeum, who had also taught the future emperor Marcus Aurelius; further study at Pergamum; and a season at Athens. A journey to Egypt in 141–142 carried him up the Nile and into a different incubatory ecology — the Sarapeion shrines, where dreamers slept for oracles of Serapis, the Hellenized god the Ptolemies had fused from Egyptian and Greek materials, and where the older dream-religion of Isis ran alongside the cult of Asclepius. That exposure the Egyptian Discourse (Or. XXXVI Keil) later recorded, and it almost certainly conditioned what came after; the man who would lie down at Pergamon to wait for a god in sleep had already seen the practice at work on Egyptian soil. He was a man of the Roman Empire at its Antonine height, fluent in its grandeur; his Roman Oration is among the most quoted celebrations of Roman order ever delivered by a Greek. The career that should have followed — the embassies, the great set-piece declamations, the chair of rhetoric — was broken almost as it began.

In the winter of 143–144 a first journey to Rome was cut short on the return by the onset of an illness that never fully left him. The Sacred Tales are unusual in ancient literature precisely because they are so personal. Aristides was sick for much of his adult life — fevers, breathing trouble, abdominal swellings, dental and aural complaints, digestive collapse, ailments his physicians could not master — and the catalog resists any single retrospective diagnosis; readers have proposed somatoform, gastrointestinal, infectious, and rheumatological causes in turn, and none accounts for the whole. In 145 he attached himself to the great healing sanctuary of Asclepius at Pergamon and began what the Tales call the kathedra: a continuous residence of two years and three months within the precinct (Or. 48.7 Keil), under the supervision of the temple priests and amid the lay community of therapeutae, the devotees of the god, of whom he became a senior member. There the afflicted slept in the holy ground in the hope of a curative dream.

This practice, incubation, was the heart of the Asclepian cult across the Greek world. Every sanctuary of the god paired its temple with an abaton — the place not to be entered by the impure — a porticoed dormitory where the worshipper, after a purificatory bath and a modest offering, lay down at nightfall on a couch to wait for the god in sleep. Asclepius was held to appear, sometimes in his own form, sometimes through the sacred snakes and dogs kept in the precinct, and to leave at dawn a remedy or a command; the cure or the prescription was the iama. The ritual sequence is documented across four centuries, from the great cure-stelae of Epidauros in the late fourth century BCE down to Aristides himself in the mid-second century CE — the architecture of the practice held remarkably constant even as its most famous patient turned it into autobiography. (The institution itself, its sanctuaries, and the god are treated under Asclepius and incubation.) Aristides recorded what he took to be hundreds of such visitations across many years, down to the cold river-bathings in midwinter, the diets, and the abstentions the god ordered, however punishing — bathing in the Aesepus when ice was breaking on its banks, being driven barefoot through frost, purgings and vomitings that left him certain only the god’s command had carried him through alive.

The book and its making

The Sacred Tales are conventionally cited as Orations XLVII–LI Keil, with the fragmentary Or. LII — the so-called Book VI — breaking off abruptly in the middle of its narrative. They were composed around 170–171 CE, more than two decades after the kathedra, when Aristides was an established and celebrated figure. The composition is not strictly chronological: he moves between an early phase of illness in the 140s and 150s and a later one in the years just before he wrote, interleaving incubatory episodes, dream-prescriptions, oratorical encouragements the god is said to have given him, and the long somatic texture of a pilgrim’s body. The standard account of how the book was made holds that it rests on a now-lost diary — the ephemerides, contemporaneous notes of dreams and divine instructions that Asclepius had ordered him to keep — selectively redeployed a quarter-century later. The reconstruction is productive but contested: where one reading treats the Tales as a documentary transcript, another insists they are a sophistic literary artifact whose very disorder is a designed effect, its periodization rhetorical as much as it is a record.

The Tales do not stand alone. They sit within a larger devotional corpus that includes a sequence of prose hymns — to Asclepius, to Zeus, to the Aegean Sea, to Serapis, to Poseidon at the Isthmus, to Athena, Heracles, and Dionysus. Whether these public performances are the outward face of the same religious experience the Tales narrate in private, or distinct generic exercises that happen to share a divine dedicatee, is one of the central problems the corpus poses; one influential reading takes the Hieroi Logoi themselves to enact hymnic praise through narrative rather than apostrophe — the life lived in the god’s company offered as an extended act of worship. Other speeches anchor the Tales in their physical setting: orations on the well and the water of the Pergamene Asklepieion, a precinct the German Archaeological Institute excavated across the mid-twentieth century, recovering the very colonnades and the Antonine gateway dedicated by L. Cuspius Pactumeius Rufinus, consul and friend of Aristides. The Eleusinian Oration mourns the burning of the Telesterion at Eleusis by the Costobocian raiders of 170 — an Antonine witness to the felt loss of an active mystery sanctuary, written by a man who treated the building itself as the indispensable condition of an effect he did not try to name.

A god, a companion, a self

What the text reports, it reports as the patient’s own conviction. Aristides writes as a man certain that Asclepius spoke to him, singled him out, and kept him alive through ordeals that should have killed him; the god is companion as much as physician, and the sufferer’s standing with him is a source of pride. The dreams do not stay within the bounds of medicine. The god dictates his diet and his bathing, but he also corrects his prose, sets him declamation subjects, forbids and then commands particular journeys, foretells the day of crises, and on occasion shares him with other powers — Sarapis, Athena, Apollo the father of Asclepius, and Hygieia, Asclepius’s daughter, the personified health who stood beside him in his temples. The relationship is jealous and total: a chosen man’s election to an intimacy that organizes his whole existence around the precinct and the couch and the morning report of what was seen. Read one way, this is the record of a life swallowed by its symptoms, illness elevated into vocation. Read another, it is the fullest surviving account of what it was, from the inside, to belong to a god — the texture of a piety that the inscriptions and votive reliefs of the cult leave mute.

The prescriptions themselves are what arrest the reader, because they so often run directly against the medicine of the day. When the physicians counseled rest and warmth, the god ordered cold; when they would have spared a weakened body, he sent it into a river in winter, or out into the open to be driven through frost, or to vomit and purge to a degree that the attendants thought would finish him. Aristides reports these contests with relish: the doctors withdraw, baffled or overruled, and the god is vindicated by the patient’s survival. Galen, the greatest physician of the age, knew of such cases and granted that the dreams of the sanctuary sometimes succeeded where the art failed; in the Tales the physicians are a foil, their prognōsis repeatedly overturned by the iama. The record is therefore not only a religious document but a piece of evidence in the long argument between temple medicine and the schools — written, pointedly, from the temple’s side, by a man for whom the god’s harshest order was the surest proof of his care.

How to read it has divided interpreters. Some have treated the Tales as a case study in psychosomatic illness or religious obsession, the dossier of an extraordinary valetudinarian; others as a rare window onto how a cultivated Greek of the high empire actually experienced his god, with the dreams taken seriously as the lived texture of ancient piety rather than mere symptom; more recent work has recovered them as literary and rhetorical achievements in their own right, and reread them against the medical culture of their day — the world of Galen, of competing therapeutic schools, of physicians who lost arguments to the god at Aristides’s bedside. The work survives in part — sections are lost, and Or. LII breaks off — and its chronology is difficult to reconstruct, which is one reason scholars read it as much for its method as for its events.

The interest of Aristides for the wider history of religion lies less in doctrine than in evidence. Few sources from the ancient world record, in the sufferer’s own voice and at such length, what it was to wait on a god for healing. Set against the cognate testimony — the oath-bound silence of the mystery cults, the anonymous and formulaic cure-stelae of the sanctuaries, the votive reliefs that say only that a vow was paid — his garrulous, named, self-regarding voice is nearly unique. He is the rare individual case through which the inner life of a whole ritual culture can be glimpsed at all; and because he was also a professional man of letters, the Tales preserve both the experience and its later management in prose.

Editions, scholarship, and the missing English text

The standard critical text of the Sacred Tales is the second volume of Bruno Keil’s Aelii Aristidis Smyrnaei quae supersunt omnia (Berlin, 1898), covering Orations XVII–LIII; Keil’s projected first volume, for the earlier speeches, was never published before his death in 1916. Around that Greek text the modern study of Aristides has grown into a substantial literature, and the curious feature of that literature is what it lacks. The foundational modern study — which reconstructed the chronology, advanced the lost-diary hypothesis, and supplied the first English version of the Tales — is Charles A. Behr’s Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1968); Behr went on to translate the complete works for Brill in 1981 and 1986. Later scholarship has approached the Tales through material culture and pilgrimage; against the contemporary medical world, as in Ido Israelowich’s Society, Medicine and Religion in the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides (Brill, 2012); and as literary art, as in Janet Downie’s At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi (Oxford, 2013), which reads the disorder of the narrative as a deliberate construction rather than a documentary accident.

Yet no public-domain English translation of the Hieroi Logoi exists, and none of the great pre-modern translators — through the early Loeb era — ever rendered them; the first complete English Aristides is Behr’s, and it remains in copyright into the later part of this century. Michael Trapp’s new Loeb edition has begun to replace it, with the Orations appearing from 2017, but the volume containing the Tales themselves has not yet been issued. The institutional backdrop is more accessible: the great cure-inscriptions of Epidauros, the prototype of the iama genre Aristides inherited, survive on stelae of the late fourth century BCE and can be read in the PHI Greek Inscriptions corpus (IG IV²,1 121) and in English translation, where the anonymous, lapidary reports of cures throw into relief just how voluble, and how singular, the one named patient’s account became.

He lived on through the disasters of the age. He survived the Antonine plague, which reached Asia in the 160s; and when an earthquake destroyed Smyrna in 178 he wrote a lament and then, for its rebuilding, a recantation, both addressed to Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus — and credit for the imperial funds that raised the city again was given to his intercession. He died about 181. The Tales preserve incubation not as an institution described from outside but as a relationship lived from within — the long, intimate, exhausting correspondence one ailing man believed he conducted with the divine.

→ Related: Dendera · Asclepius · Second Sophistic · Marcus Aurelius · Serapis · Incubation Pagan Christian · Eleusis · Roman Empire · Ancient Egypt · Isis · Apollo · Hygieia · Mystery Religions