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Asklepios On the Move: Health, Healing, and Cult in Classical Greece by Calloway B. Scott A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics New York University September 2017 ___________________________ Barbara Kowalzig ProQuest Number:10617149 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ProQuest 10617149 Published by ProQuest LLC ( 2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 Dedication To my wife and my parents !iii Acknowledgements I have incurred more and deeper debts in writing this dissertation than I could have guessed when I began it. In the summer of 2016, in the push to complete a final draft of the project, I was diagnosed with cancer. This, naturally, threw up some unexpected obstacles to finishing the dissertation on time and questions about how best to move forward with the project. The whole community of the NYU Classics Department, particularly David Levene, Barbara Kowalzig, Raffaella Cribiore, and Jay Meuller will forever have my gratitude for their care, support, and encouragement. It is no exaggeration to say that, without the whole department, this dissertation would not have been possible. Every member of the Classics Department at NYU has left his or her mark on this project, in one way or another. My interest in healing cults and medicine were sparked in my first year of graduate school, in which I wrote papers for Joan Connelly on the cult of Asklepios at Epidauros and on Thucydides’ account of the Athenian plague. In those early years, I still believed that I was going to write about Greek tragedy, until Andy Monson (and Dan Hoyer) convinced me that, at heart, I was really a historian. David Sider has always indulged my queries on matters relating to poetry and Pre-socratic philosophy over cocktails. Raffaella Cribiore pointed me to parallels in later antiquity I had never considered. So too, Joy Connolly and Mike Peachin have always been excellent sounding boards and available to talk through a conceptual problem. Thanks, too, to David Konstan and Adam Becker who have read individual chapters, always with incisive feedback. Special thanks too to Colin Webster of UC Davis who has, by this point, surely read and provided detailed comments upon far more of this dissertation than the bonds of friendship demand. !iv The last two years of research on this project were generously supported by two different fellowships. The New York University Center for the Humanities provided a dynamic and exciting cross-disciplinary environment which, I hope has left its mark on this work. So too, the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship allowed me the freedom to complete the remaining bulk of the writing. This project really took its first form as a term paper for Barbara Kowalzig, my primary advisor, on the emigration of Asklepios to Athens and the work done for that paper became a core part of the dissertation’s third chapter. In the intervening years since that first paper, Barbara has assiduously pushed me to broaden the scope of my thinking and see its potential relevance to other fields. She has pressed me to consider the fullest implications of whatever I happened to be arguing and to sharpen those arguments as much as possible. She has in every way made me a more versatile and careful scholar, and this dissertation would look very different, and much the poorer, without her guidance. Any short-comings and errors in the work are entirely mine, and likely because I ignored her advice. !v Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv List of Figures viii Introduction 1 Outline and scope 5 What is health, anyway? 10 Chapter One: Hygieia Between Body and Body-Politic 17 Communities of health and illness 19 Homer, Hesiod, and the social power of loimos 21 Hippocratic hygieia and the balance of the humors 30 Hygieia and cult 41 Paianes: A sympotic song for health 46 Health, charis, and the exchange of pleasure 57 Healthy and wealthy in the comic city 63 Conclusion 73 Chapter Two: Textual Corpora: Narratives of Care in Classical Medicine 76 A systems approach to health-care 77 “Hippocratics” and the missing voice 91 Bodies and texts: reading the cure 98 Reading the body 105 The social body 121 Chapter Three: The Topography of Care: Gods about the Town 134 !vi The topos hygies: ancient theories about healthy places 136 Sanatorium and liminality: modern approaches to cult locations 141 Maleatas and Asklepios: origins 144 Asklepios between and against: Epidauros and the Akte 153 Asklepios and the Argive response 159 Inside and outside: Asklepios at Sikyon 165 Athens: delimiting the body-politic 176 At home abroad: Asklepios in Piraeus and the Acropolis 182 Oropos: Asklepios/Amphiaraos on the front-lines 189 Conclusion 197 Chapter Four: Medicine as Meeting Place 201 Herodotus, Hippocrates, and medicalizing the other 204 Médecins sans frontières: a Mediterranean medical koine? 219 Asklepios and Eshmun 241 Life on the edge: Apollo among the Scythians 247 Conclusion 271 Conclusion(s) 273 Appendix: Evidence for and nature of incubatory healing 278 Bibliography 288 !vii List of Figures Fig. 1. Archinos relief. National Museum, Athens 3369 114 Fig. 2. Map of the Eastern Peloponnese and Attica 146 Fig. 3. Map of the Black Sea/Cults of Apollo Ietros 252 !viii Introduction In the last 20-30 years classicists (not to mention historians of medicine broadly) have put great effort into understanding ancient medicinal practice as part of a broader social sphere. As a result we have seen a steady increase in the flow of conference proceedings, books, chapters, and articles focused on placing ancient medicine in its social and cultural context.1 During this time, the investigation of “cultural” or “social” context typically connoted any attempt to step back from medical and technical writings as timeless documents of a purely intellectual endeavor that discuss transhistorically valid entities like disease, and instead aimed to historicize these writings and their subjects as products of a particular time and place. On this view, these ancient works bear the imprints of prevailing cultural and ideological projects which cannot be fully explicated by recourse to the texts themselves, and therefore require supplemental “contextualizing” of various stripes. Such scholarly works might seek, for instance, meaningful points of contact between the pathological language of the dramatic stage and emerging medical terminology or trace the methodological entanglements of medicine, ethnography, and historiography. They might interrogate the role played by constructions of gender in shaping medical practice and theory, or scrutinize the material and the embodied—highly culturally determined categories—as analogical bases for processes of intellection and theorization. Ultimately, what such wide- ranging efforts share (consciously or not) is a desire to give “emic” accounts of ancient medicine. 1 The list is too long to catalogue here. Salient examples which have been central to ideas developed in this thesis include: Edelsteins 1945; Edelstein 1967; Lloyd 1979; 1983; 1991; 2003; Parker 1983; Porter 1985; Nutton 1992; 1995; 2013; Dean-Jones 1994; Avalos 1995; van der Eijk et al. 1995; van der Eijk 2005; King 1998; Jouanna 1999 and 2012; Thomas 2000; Kosak 2004; Cook 2005a; Horden 2008; Mitchell-Boyask 2008; Wickkiser 2008; Totelin 2009; Holmes 2010b; Israelowich 2012; Lang 2012; Petsalis-Diomidis 2012; Baker 2013; Green 2014; Thumiger 2015; Winterbottom 2016. !1 In other words, they attempt to take seriously ancient actors’ own categories, considering any valid account of ancient medicine to rely primarily on historically relative concepts. Narratives of continuity (or rupture) between some “then” and some “now” violate this push towards historicism. The problem of this approach, however, is its tendency to move one of two ways: either it works inside out (medicine influences other spheres) or from the outside in (other spheres influence medicine). To understand the dynamics at play in the production of medical knowledge where embodied humans are active subjects and sites of cultural production all at once, one needs to capture ancient medicine not just in its cultural context, but as a cultural field which set parameters for the enactment of a wide variety of social relations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the efforts to understand the apparently conflicting intersections of health, medicine, and religion during what we might call “the long Classical period.” In this dissertation, I concentrate on the power and attraction of (mostly Classical) healing cults as they encapsulated the complicated web weaving together Greeks’ ideas about health and healing; their individual experiences at healing shrines; the relationship between landscape, politics, and healing; and medico-religious practice as a basis of transcultural interactivity across the Mediterranean. I argue that the healing encounter—both in its “religious” and “secular” aspects—acts as a central site in the production of cultural forms and social relations adaptable to the disparate needs of individuals, polities, and peoples in the ancient world. The principal goal of this dissertation is to look beyond the conceptual commerce between medicine and other domains of cultural praxis. Rather, I attempt to think about medicine, health, and healing as sites of social production, or, perhaps more accurately, as !2 frameworks from which networks of symbolic systems and social actors spring.