Anatomical Votives: Popular Medicine in Republican Italy?

Chapter 4 Anatomical Votives: Popular Medicine in Republican Italy? Rebecca Flemming Introduction One of the most prolifically surviving ancient engagements with the human body is represented by the vast quantity of anatomical votives found—as part of larger votive arrays—at sacred sites across republican (or Hellenistic) central Italy; greatly outnumbering their rough Greek equivalents.1 Thousands, tens of thousands of predominantly terracotta body parts once offered to the gods have been recovered and recorded from locations in southern Etruria, Latium, northern Campania, and various adjacent areas (see fig. 1).2 Many, many more have escaped record, or been mentioned only in the most cursory manner. One visitor to Veii in 1909 reported, for instance, that he saw a ‘heap of such offerings piled up . there were all possible members . ’, but few of these items seem to have emerged into the public domain.3 Even today, the roughly six thousand votive wombs and swaddled infants found during excavations of the Italic Temple south of the forum at Paestum in the late 1980s have not yet been published.4 Keeping track of both sites and finds, not to mention the exact relation- ship between the two, is therefore tricky. Counts and catalogues are inevitably imprecise and incomplete, but around 150 locations in central Italy are known to have produced votive body parts thus far; in numbers ranging from a hand- ful to thousands, and including much uncertainty in between.5 Even where reports are reasonably detailed, types of ex-voto are more likely to be listed than 1 See e.g. Forsén 2004 for a summary of the Greek anatomical votive phenomenon, which dis- plays both similarities to and differences from the Italian material; and see also Hughes 2008 for a more generally comparative approach. 2 Hence the rather cumbersome sobriquet ‘etrusco-laziale-campano’/‘Etruscan-Latial- Campanian’ (or E-L-C for short) votive practice, after Comella 1981. 3 Robinson 1923, 340, citing Prof. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. 4 Greco 1988, 79. 5 See Turfa 2006a, 63. © trustees of columbia university in the city of new york, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�6040_005 106 Flemming ET R URIA UMBRI Vulci Tuscana Tiber Tarquinii A Gravisca Grasceta Falerii Novi Caere Veii Pyrgi Rome Nemi/Aricia LA Fregellae Lavinium T IUM Satricum SAMNIUM Antium Cales CAMP ANIA Pompeii Paestum TYRRHENIAN SEA Figure 1 Map of central Italy showing the main sites referred to in this chapter. Source: Ancient World Mapping Center, adapted by Alessandro Launaro and Rachel Aucott. actually enumerated. Still, to give some sense of scale, one of the richest and best recorded arrays of anatomical offerings comes from the small sanctuary at Ponte di Nona, just east of Rome, which yielded a total of 8,395 terracotta votives during excavations in the 1970s, of which 6,171 were identifiable.6 The overwhelming majority (96.11%) of these were body parts, with feet the largest contingent (2,368), and heads next in line (985). The site can also be used to illustrate wider issues of chronology and identi- fication relating to Italian votive practice. The indications are that the sanctuary was fully functioning in the late fourth century BCE, but most of the pottery and coins found in the same deposits as the terracottas are of third- and sec- ond-century date, and the place seems to have fallen out of religious use in the first century BCE. There is no evidence that speaks directly to the identity of the deity, or deities, to which the temple was dedicated. Many other sacred sites in central Italy from around the same time remain similarly anonymous, 6 Potter and Wells 1985. These are in addition to those collected in the nineteenth century, and those sold on the illegal antiquities market thereafter..

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