Asclepius

Summary

Asclepius is the physician of Greek myth who became the god of healing, a son of Apollo, whose best-known sanctuary was Epidaurus in the Peloponnese; the Romans called him Aesculapius. In the Iliad he is a man, "the blameless physician", and father of the two healers who tend the wounded of the Greek army before Troy, Podaleirius and Machaon. When an arrow struck Menelaus, Machaon was called; he drew the arrow from the belt, laid the wound bare, sucked out the blood, and with sure knowledge spread on it the soothing remedies that Cheiron had once given his father in friendship.

Pindar tells the story of his birth in his third Pythian ode. Coronis, daughter of Phlegyas, was carrying Apollo's child when she lay with a stranger from Arcadia; Apollo knew it in his temple at Delphi and sent his sister Artemis, who killed her. When her kinsmen had laid her body on the pyre and the flame ran round it, Apollo said: I can no longer bear to destroy my own child by a most pitiful death together with his mother. In one step he reached the child, the fire parted for him, he snatched it from the corpse and carried it to the centaur Cheiron to be taught to heal people of painful diseases. All who came to him with sores, or with limbs wounded by bronze or by a stone thrown from afar, or with bodies wasting from summer's heat or winter's cold, he released from their pains, some with gentle incantations, some with soothing potions, some with remedies wrapped round their limbs, some he set right by surgery. But gold tempted him: for a large fee he brought back from death a man already caught, and Zeus hurled the thunderbolt through physician and patient alike and tore the breath from their chests. After the story Pindar says: do not crave immortal life, my soul, but use to the full what is possible.

The Library adds that Apollo cursed the raven that brought him the news and turned it black, and that Athena gave Asclepius the Gorgon's blood: the blood from the veins on the left side he used for destruction, the blood from the right side for saving, and with it he raised the dead, among them Hippolytus, son of Theseus. Zeus, fearing that people would learn the healing art from him and rescue each other, struck him with the thunderbolt, and Apollo in anger killed the Cyclopes who made it.

The people of Epidaurus had another version, which Pausanias records. Phlegyas came to the Peloponnese with his daughter, who had hidden from her father that she was with child by Apollo; she gave birth in the land of Epidaurus and exposed the child on a mountain now called "the Nipple". A goat of the flock suckled him and the herd's watchdog guarded him. The herdsman, missing the goat and the dog, searched until he found the child, and as he came near to pick him up he saw lightning flashing from the child, thought it something divine, and turned away. Soon it was reported over every land and sea that he found whatever he wished to heal the sick and that he raised the dead. In his temple at Epidaurus stood a statue of ivory and gold by Thrasymedes: the god seated, holding a staff in one hand and the other above the head of the serpent, with a dog lying beside him. And in the sanctuary stood stone slabs inscribed with the names of the men and women Asclepius had healed, the disease each suffered from, and the means of cure, in the Doric dialect.

The sick slept in a building set apart in the sanctuary and saw the god in their sleep, or between sleep and waking. He touched them with his hand, gave them a drug or operated on them, and the sacred dogs and serpents of the sanctuary healed patients by licking them, as the healing slabs themselves record.

The idea his story turns on is that the physician brings people out of pain and up to the edge of death, and when he crosses that edge and brings back someone death has taken, he is punished. He was himself born from a dead body on a pyre, snatched from the fire by his father; he went on to bring people back from illness, then back from death, and Zeus struck him with the fire he had first come out of. That is why his work in the stories stays with the wound, the sore and the fever: he heals what can be healed, and undying life is not people's share.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read it. The name is Attic Ἀσκληπιός, Asklēpios, and Doric, the dialect of Epidaurus, Ἀσκλαπιός, Asklāpios. Remove the Greek ending -ios and there remain a glottal onset, then s, k, l and a long ā, then p. We read it as two words, āsī al-kalm, "the healer of the wound". In Lane asā al-jurḥ is to dress a wound, treat it curatively or surgically, and the āsī is a physician skilled in treatment, particularly of wounds. Al-kalm in Lisān al-ʿArab is a wound, plural kulūm, and it says the Arabs called the place of a snake's bite on the bitten man a kalm. Lane joins the two words in one saying: "this is an affair of which the wound will not be remedied", lā yuʾsā kalmuhu. The m becomes a Greek p; both are lip sounds. That is what the stories make him: his son heals Menelaus's wound with his father's remedies, the people who came to him in Pindar came with limbs wounded by bronze and stone, and the serpent is his sign.

Linguistic Root

The ancients disagreed about the name as the moderns do. Edelstein says the ancient interpreters agreed that the name was a compound whose second part was ἤπιος, "mild, soothing", and differed over the first. Some said he healed Askles, a tyrant of Epidaurus, of an eye disease and was named after him; the poet Isyllus at Epidaurus said Apollo named him after his mother Aigle, Coronis's name there; others made him "the one who does not let the body dry up", from the negative and the verb "to dry up". LSJ notes that Demosthenes accented the name differently because he derived it from ἤπιος. Edelstein quotes Farnell: the name "has hitherto defied all attempts to explain it".

Beekes's etymological dictionary of Greek gathers the dialect forms of the name: Αἰσκλαπιός at Epidaurus, Ἀσγλαπιός in Boeotia, Ἀγλαπιός in Laconia, and Αἰσχλαβιός on a bronze figure in Corinthian letters. It calls this variety typical of Pre-Greek words, traces the name to a base with a soft k before which an s sometimes appears and sometimes does not, and rejects a Hittite etymology because it does not explain the k. This touches the reading in two ways: k and l stand in every form, and they are the letters of kalm; but the s is missing from the Laconian form, while in āsī it belongs to the root, and the lip consonant is p in some forms and b in others, but m in none.

The first word of our reading is the physician's name across the old tongue. In Lane asā al-jurḥ is to dress a wound, the āsī is the physician, isāʾ is medicine, and one says "medicine dispels grief". In Aramaic ʾāsyā is the physician: in the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran all the physicians, exorcists and wise men could not heal Pharaoh, and the Samaritan Targum renders Exodus 15:26 "I am the Lord your healer" with it. Brown, Driver and Briggs say the name of King Asa means "perhaps healer". With the same root the project's Egyptian essay reads the name of Isis as al-āsiya, the grieving healer, and the Aśvins page reads the name of the two Indian physicians.

The second word is al-kalm, the wound. Lisān al-ʿArab quotes a rajaz line in which a man complains "as a bitten man complains whose wounds have festered", and says the Arabs called the place of a snake's bite a kalm, though its proper sense is a wound. The word holds the wound and the snake together, and the snake is Asclepius's sign.

As for the letters: the hamza at the start of āsī is the vowel at the start of the Greek name, s is s, k is k, l is l, and m becomes p, one of the lip sounds that interchange under the Juthoor laws. The weak points are three: the ancients themselves divided the name otherwise, its dialect forms are many, and the m appears in none of them.

The Greek essay mentions Asclepius when it reads Apollo's name as aballa, "he recovered from illness": it says Apollo is first of all the god of medicine, "his father Asclepius the god of medicine", whereas the texts make Asclepius Apollo's son, not his father. The last of the ancient explanations meets the essay's reading: for them Asclepius is the one who does not let the body dry up, and the essay reads Apollo from the moistening that is the opposite of dryness and disease. Father and son are read, by the ancients and by the essay, from one image: giving moisture back to the body.

Key Mythic Narratives

The serpent that came to Rome

Livy says that a pestilence struck Rome and its countryside, the Sacred Books were consulted for a remedy, and it was found that Asclepius had to be brought from Epidaurus. Ovid tells the rest: the Romans sent their ships to Epidaurus, the god came out to them as a great serpent and went aboard, and when the ship reached Rome, where the Tiber divides round the island in its midst, the serpent went ashore on the island, took his divine form again, and the plague left the city.

Hippolytus at Aricia

Pausanias says that at Epidaurus an old slab records Hippolytus's gift of twenty horses to the god, and that the people of Aricia in Italy tell how Asclepius raised him from the dead after he was killed by his father Theseus's curse; he refused to forgive his father, went to Aricia, became its king and dedicated a precinct to Artemis. In Ovid Hippolytus says he saw the underworld and that his life could not have been given back but for the remedies of Apollo's son, and Diana then hid him in her grove under another name.

Asclepius at Sidon and Beirut

A man of Sidon told Pausanias that the Phoenicians understood the gods better than the Greeks, because they make Apollo the father of Asclepius and give him no mortal mother: Asclepius is the air that gives men and animals their health, and Apollo the sun that gives the air its health by his course through the seasons. The Phoenician Asclepius is Eshmun, as a trilingual inscription from Sardinia shows, naming the god in Punic "Eshmun Merre" and in Greek "Asklepios Merre".

Symbolic Reading

The essays do not read Asclepius's name, but they set other healers beside him. The Babylonian essay compares Gula, goddess of healing, with Asclepius, saying her symbol is the dog because the dog licks wounds and heals them, and that Asclepius's symbol is the snake, which is Gula's symbol too. The Sumerian essay compares Asarluhi, son of Enki and god of incantation and healing, with Asclepius and with the Egyptian Thoth, and among its readings of his name gives, as the weakest, āsā and lāḥa, "healing made manifest". The Indian essay makes the snake the symbol of healing and names "the staff of Asclepius".

At Epidaurus the two animals are together: the dog that guarded the child on the mountain and lay beside the statue, and the serpent under his hand. Both heal by licking on the healing slabs. The nearest Semitic witness to the serpent on the staff is in the book of Numbers: serpents bit the Israelites in the wilderness, and Moses made a serpent of bronze and set it on a pole, "and if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived". The serpent that wounds is the one from which healing is sought, as Lisān al-ʿArab joins the wound and the snake's bite in the one word kalm.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In India the Aśvins are the gods' physicians: they give sight back to the blind, give a woman whose leg was cut off in battle a leg of iron, and make the old Cyavāna young again. This wiki reads their name from the same asā, "the two healers". Asclepius is like them, a physician who heals wounds and blindness and gives back life; they differ in their reward: the Aśvins stay in heaven, while Zeus strikes Asclepius for bringing someone back from death.

In Egypt there is Isis the healer, whom the Egyptian essay also reads from asā, joining grief and healing in one word; she draws the poison out of Re and revives Osiris. The Sumerian essay sets Asclepius beside Thoth for magic and healing, and a medical papyrus in Berlin joins Thoth with Khonsu in a single name.

On the Phoenician coast there is Eshmun, the Asclepius of Sidon and Beirut, whose page reads his name from samn, the healing oil.

The raising of the dead for which Asclepius was punished belongs to the story of the food of immortality: who may escape death. His teaching of medicine to people, and Zeus's fear that they would learn it and rescue one another, belong to the stories of culture heroes.