Aesculapius- Roman GodDeity"God of Medicine"

Coronis and the Crow

Apollo loved the mortal woman Coronis, but she took a human lover while pregnant with his child. A white crow discovered the affair and flew to tell the god. Apollo killed Coronis with an arrow. As her body burned on the pyre, he felt remorse and reached into the flames to pull the unborn child from her womb. He cursed the crow, turning its feathers from white to black.

The child was Aesculapius. Apollo gave him to the centaur Chiron on Mount Pelion, who taught him the properties of herbs and the art of surgery. Aesculapius learned to cure everything. Then he learned to raise the dead. Ovid names Hippolytus among those he restored to life.

The Thunderbolt

Pluto, lord of the underworld, went to Jupiter. His realm was being depopulated. If the dead could be recalled at will, the boundary between life and death would collapse.

Jupiter agreed. He struck Aesculapius with a thunderbolt. Apollo, grief-stricken, could not strike Jupiter but killed the Cyclopes who had forged the bolt. Jupiter punished him for that by making him serve as a slave to the mortal King Admetus for a year.

The story did not end there. Jupiter placed Aesculapius among the stars as the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer, and granted him full divine status. The physician who had overstepped became the god of healing.

The Serpent's Voyage

In 293 BCE a plague swept through Rome. The Sibylline Books were consulted: Aesculapius must be brought from Epidaurus. Livy records the embassy, led by Quintus Ogulnius, sailing to Greece.

As the envoys prepared to depart, a huge serpent slithered from the temple at Epidaurus, wound through the city streets past astonished Greeks who recognized the divine manifestation, and climbed aboard the Roman ship. Ovid describes it in the Metamorphoses: enormous, with a golden crest, its coils shaking the vessel as it settled in the stern.

When the ship entered the Tiber, the serpent left and swam to an island in the middle of the river. It coiled itself on the shore. The Romans built a temple there. The island was later clad in travertine carved to look like a ship's prow and stern. A memorial to the vessel that brought the god. The plague ceased.

The Dreamers

The Temple of Aesculapius on Tiber Island practiced incubation: the sick slept in porticoes and dormitories within the precinct, hoping the god would appear in their dreams and reveal their cure. Sacred serpents lived in the temple grounds, and their touch was believed to heal. Patients who recovered dedicated terracotta models of whatever body part the god had mended.

Slaves were brought to the island when ill. Suetonius records that the emperor Claudius granted freedom to sick slaves abandoned there by their masters, ruling that a master who left a slave to die forfeited his ownership.