In the midst of ancient Rome there was an island sanctuary. People came here from all over Italy to touch the snake in the holy place. The sick, the dying and the disabled gathered for healing and would spend many months isolated from the community, driking from the water of the holy well and praying the god for help. Following the ancient tradition I also went to the holy place and touched the snake of healing, remembering all those who came here through the centuries. This post is about the sacred island, its cults and mythology, all of which is part of my research project on ancient rivers.
This month I have the great privilege of being a Visiting Fellow at École Française de Rome (pardon my French:) or the French Academy in Rome, a place renowned for its library. I owe thanks to the fellows of this august institution who have kindly granted me access to the great resources at their disposal in order to carry out my project on ancient rivers. I am sharing my resarch with you, my dear readers, in the hope that you might find some of it interesting, if not salutary.
At the beginning of my pilgrimage to the sacred island in the heart of Rome, I crossed the Fabrician bridge (Pons Fabricius), which preserves the memory of its ancient restoration, written in large letters in the middle of the arch. It is the only bridge from ancient Rome that remains standing to this day. The Latin reads:
L FABRICIVS CF CVR VIAR
FACIVNDUM COERAVIT
“Lucius Fabricius, son of Gaius, Curator of the Roads took care that this be done.”
The reference is to a Roman official who constructed the bridge in 62 BC. As I walked on this monument I paid hommage to two standing herms with four heads looking in different direction. They keep the memory of the ancient god Janus, who was typically represented with two faces (or two heads) looking in opposite directions, which were sometimes doubled to make four as is this case. Janus was the mediator between heaven and earth, fire and water, and the guardian of all passages, including doors, bridges and tunnels. Hence we still call the first month of the year January after him (and the word janitor comes from the same root). Although this sculpture was only moved to the bridge in the 19th century, it is a most appropriate symbol of the ancient divinity and probably comes from one of the temples of Janus. Christians reinterpreted the monument in the 16th century saying the heads represent the four architects that Pope Sixtus V entrusted with the reconstruction of the bridge. As the story goes, they could not agree on anything at all so the pope had them killed and made a representation of their heads looking in different directions. No wonder some tourists nowadays call the bridge “Fab(ulous)”!
As I arrived at the centre of the island I stood on the piazza which is dominated by the church of San Bartholomew, one Jesus’s twelve apostles who preached in Armenia and was marytred there. The church was built in the 10th century at the behest of Emperor Otto III and suffered many rennovations over the years. Curiously, Pope John Paul II expanded its dedication to all the modern martyrs of the 20th and 21st century. Perhaps I can count myself in this great number as I was born in Yugoslavia, and this particular pope had a soft spot for those of us who suffered under Communism.
THE HOLY WELL
Far more interesting is the interior of the church and the remains of the walls of the great sanctuary underneath it. In the very middle of the basilica stands the Medieval head of a well that brings drinking water from deep underground. This well was at the centre of the ancient sanctuary of Asclepius (or Aesculapius), the god of healing. The water was said to have miraculous qualities and was used in rituals of ablution as well as for drinking by the many people who sought the therapy of the god of medicine.
Medieval head of ancient well that stood at the centre of Asclepius’ sanctuary
Looking around the naves to each side, I saw Roman columns that archaeologists used to call spolia (hence English “spoils”) because they are clearly ancient materials reused in a Christian setting. The columns probably came from one of the several temples that Romans built on the island. Beneath the church lie the archaeological remains of the great sanctuary of Asclepius which was constructed in the early 3rd century BC.
THE SNAKE AND THE HEALER
The story of Asclepius’ arrival is well known. A disastrous plague struck Rome in 290s BC and no help came from all the usual rites. Humans and animals perished in great numbers. The priests consulted a collection of prophecies called the Sibylline books and proclaimed that the Greek god of medicinie needs to be summoned from his home in Epidauros. This was not unusual: the Romans were flexible in adding new gods to their pantheon. An embassy headed by Quintus Ogulnius was sent to obtain the god from Greece but the Greek priests naturally refused to yield the cult statue of their god. However, one of the snakes that resided in the sanctuary climbed on board and sailed with the embassy. According to Roman tradition, when they reached Rome the animal jumped out to swim in the Tiber and made a home for himself on the Tiber Island. Hence snakes were kept in the new sanctuary of the god that covered the southern half of the island. Snake was a symbol of the god’s healing art and many pharmacies still use this ancient symbol. In the 1st century BC the southern tip of the island was remodeled in the shape of a ship’s prow to make it seem as though the island were a ship sailing in the river. Parts of this wonderful construction are still standing. The monument evokes the myth of Asclepius’ voluntary arrival to Rome as a snake. Though the face of the god has been completely worn out by the ravages of time, most of the twirling snake still survives. I touched its ancient coils remembering all the patients who came here with their ailments, hopes and prayers.
the remains of the stone ship on the Tiber Island
a close up of the god sailing on the stone ship with the snake on his staff
Countless people came to the island sanctuary in the ancient period. Many of them were desparate and had no other place to go, having exhausted the standard means of healing offered by ancient medicine.
The longest ancient description of the sanctuary comes from Festus’ epitome of Verrius Flaccus, an antiquarian who wrote in the time of Augustus:
A temple was built for Asclepius on the island, since the sick are most greatly aided by doctors through use of water. The serpent is guardian of this temple, because it is a most vigilant animal—a quality especially appropriate for protecting the health of a sufferer. Dogs are made present in his sanctuary, because he was nourished by the teats of a dog. He holds a knotty staff, which symbolizes the difficulty of this art. He is crowned by laurel, because this tree is a source of many remedies. Hens are sacrificed to him.
Plutarch says the site was chosen because the island was more salubrious than the rest of the city. This would indicate the water from the well was of better quality than river water. The Romans stopped drinking Tiber water already in the Republic as they understood it to be polluted. It is not the vicinity of the river that made the place salubrious but its isolation as an island, of course. Vitruvius says that such places are normally chosen as sites of healing gods because curative properties help with the recovery of the sick. Thus the island was chosen because it was seen as a salubrious environment removed from most of the pollution of the metropolis. Many patients would stay for prolonged periods during which fasting and abstinence was required as a prerequisite to communicate with the god who prescribed their therapy in dreams.
a statue of Asclepius, the god of healing
WHERE DREAMS MAY COME: RITUALS AND VOTIVES
As Gill Renberg argues in his book (whose title I pinched here), many of Asclepius’ devotees practiced the ritual of incubatio, which involved sleeping in the abaton or the sacred chamber. Asclepius would appear to them in a dream to reveal his instructions for their therapy. This could involve ingesting specific foods, potions or herbs or practicing rituals such as anointing with oil, smearing in mud, running around the temple, going barefoot, and purification ceremonies, ritual ablutions, and wearing white clothing. The Greek author Aelius Aristides (117–181 AD) was particularly pious to Asclepius and describes some of the rituals he practiced in another sanctuary of the god:
I was lying, in accordance with a certain dream vision between the doors and the latticed gates of the Temple, and the god gave me the following verse as an oracle: 'In the evening they flourished by the grassy springs'. Then I anointed myself in the open air, in the enclosure of the temple, and bathed in the Sacred Well, and there was no one who believed what he saw.
After the unification of Italy in the 1870, Italian engineers started the construction of massive river embankments to protect Rome from flooding. During these works, 784 votive deposits were dredged up from the river and 480 of them were found in the immediate vicinity of the Tiber Island. They are monuments to the lived religion of individuals who came to the sanctuary to pray for healing. Votives were typically made of clay (though there are some bronze and silver ones) and in the shape of the body parts or organs affected by illness. Most of them are now kept in the Museo Romano di Palazzo Massimo and date to the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. The extant number represents only a small fraction of the total. Votives were typically scattered in various parts around the temple, and old materials were periodically removed and deposited in favissae, ditches dug up in the surrounding area. Most of the surviving votives come from such a place, meaning that they were buried as leftovers to make room for new ones.
votives in the shape of body parts that needed healing
The location of the finds in the vicinity of bridges puts them at some distance from the temple of Asclepius and probably indicates some of the dedications were also offered to other gods worshipped on the island, not only the Greek healer. In his book on ther river Tiber, the French scholar Joël Le Gall’s proposed that many of the votives were also offered to Tiberinus, the god of the river. This would make sense from both a historical and religious perspective, as we know the island had several temples, including a temple to Tiberinus and Gaia, his wife. But more on them in a future post…
the Tiber island in the Roman Empire: a reconstruction
Some modern readers may think the ancient rituals to be acts of superstition but there are also many inscriptions that were set up by devotees on the Tiber Island in thanks for the gift of healing they had received. Most of them are in Greek and attest to the popularity of the god among the lower classes as many of the worshipers seem to be slaves and freedmen. In fact, elite Romans such as Cicero mocked some of the rituals in the cult of Asclepius. The inscriptions express the gratitude of individuals who say they have been healed from all sorts of ailments, for example blindness and gastrointestinal disease. Most of these briefly express thanks in the same way that such inscriptions still do in modern Christian sanctuaries. For example, one of the Latin texts found at Pons Cestius (the other bridge to the Tiber Island) reads:
Aescolapio | donom dat | lubens merito | M(arcus) Populicio(s) M(arci) f(ilius).
“Marcus Populicios, son of Marcus, gives this gladly as a gift to the deserving Asclepius.”
In conclusion the Tiber Island is a unique environment. I stayed for some time lying under the verdant trees of the island and enjoying the sounds of the water burbling around me. Towards the end of my visit, as I was leaving the island I thought of the devotions practised by so many people over the centuries. The sheer amount of votive offerings is staggering and indicates a level of personal involvement and emotion towards the place and its deities. Worshippers believed the gods had the ability to change their health and many spent weeks if not months in the safe seclusion of the island sanctuary praying for deliverance. Asclepius dominated in the diverse religious landscape of the island but he was not its only god. Next time I shall write more about the other healer of Rome, the god of the river, who was represented as a snake.
Tiber Island from the north
