Was Aelius Aristides Just a Peculiar Hypochondriac?

Was Aelius Aristides just a peculiar hypochondriac?

Up until the age of 25 Aristides had a life of education and cultural travel, visiting many places in the search of furthering is knowledge of rhetoric. And it was highly likely that this was all leading to a successful future career as a rhetorician, with the great aspirations of speaking in the Roman Forums. But during his travels, at Syene, some tropical disease caused his health to break down, thus was the start of his ill-health that was to blight him for the majority of the rest of his life . The question of whether Aristides was just a вЂ?peculiar hypochondriac’ had been debated by many historians, and no clear solution has been reached. Bowersock fervently believes that Aristides had hypochondria of an advanced kind, and records how “he took exceptional pleasure in recording all his symptoms” , all of which made up his book The Sacred Tales. This view is greatly opposed by Pearcy who believes that the “Sacred Tales are not…a diary or simple account of how a hypochondriac’s dreams came true” , for a much broader view needs to be taken on the subject. He instead sees them as the “narratives of how the god of healing sent dreams to cure one of his literary devotees” .

Aristides’ health was not improving and so whilst in Egypt he turned to the healing god, Serapis, but it appears that he was not cured and the disease persisted for sometime thereafter . Over the months to come his illness worsened and a trip to Rome for him to deliver an oration was a disaster, for when Aristides finally arrived in Rome he was far too ill to deliver any such speech. For as Behr commentated “Rome, the stage of his ambitions, became the cemetery of his hopes” . On his return home to Smyrna he consulted his doctors and was instructed to go to the Warm Springs near Smyrna, and it was here that he received his first revelation from Asclepius, the supreme healing god of the ancient world. He was instructed to walk barefoot outside, which he did, and from that point on it appeared that Aristides had been admonished to keep a record of his dreams , which were later to be known as the Sacred Tales. Which were an account of 130 dreams that Aristides received from Asclepius between the years of 130-171AD, instructing him to do perform such tasks that would bring him good health. The majority of these instructions were irrational, for example when Asclepius supposedly ordered Aristides to go without bathing for five years, except on occasions in winter when he was to plunge himself into rivers, seas and cisterns . Fasting was not an uncommon instruction for Asclepius to give Aristides, with only the allowance of milk to keep his strength up. However whilst all these various tasks were going on Asclepius was also insistent that Aristides should not neglect his literary gift, and therefore even when he was at his weakest he still spent the day writing and orating and criticizing his own work .

Some of the tasks that Asclepius instructs him to do seem so harsh, that if Aristides had been really in such ill-health he would have certainly got far worse. But in each of these cases he somehow survives, and he records his health apparently improving. This can be seen in the case of when Aristides was instructed to go down to a river in the middle of winter, when “it was icy cold, and the pebbles were fixed to one another by the frost so that they seemed like a continuous sheet of ice” and to cast himself into the deepest pool. And when he emerged from the water he records his skin having a “rosy hue and there was a lightness throughout my body…there was also much shouting, “Great is Asclepius”.” . Millar records that many times in the Sacred Tales that “the dreams of the god and the therapeutic acts prescribed by him (Asclepius) gave him warmth, mental contentment, harmony, spiritual strength, and comfort” . However Aristides was not the only person that believed dreams held the answer to healing and medicine. Galen was a 2nd century physician and philosopher worshipped Asclepius, and claimed that dreams were the answer to all the medical problems. He is recorded carrying out operations under the instructions of what he had dreamed, “guided by two dreams that appeared to us very clearly, we made an incision into the artery…we allowed the blood to flow until it stopped of its own accord, as the dream instructed” . These tasks denoted to Aristides in his dreams were not the only things to make him feel better, but also oratory. He notes that the feelings that he gets when he is practicing his oratory are ones of warmth and that his body becomes light, and makes strong links between the art of oratory and religion , and therefore healing. Furthermore on one occasion when Aristides was complaining of an awful toothache, Asclepius told him to read one of his speeches to his friends, and by the end of the session his toothache had gone . This whole event shows that Aristides was in fact making the pain out to be a lot worse than it was, and all the reading of the speech did was to help him take is mind off the apparent pain.

As already mentioned Asclepius greatly encouraged Aristides’ professional success, and during his time at Temple of Asclepius at Pergamum he was ordered to hold imaginary conversations with Plato, Demosthenes and Thucydides . After a year of illness Aristides was instructed to deliver a speech, and telling the crowd before he started how out of practice he was and was only speaking on the wishes of Asclepius, delivered the most impressive speech. But this could have been a subtle method by Aristides to overawe the crowd, as they were expecting very little, but received a well rehearsed and well delivered speech. Philips states after this initial oration “Aristides went from strength to strength” . Aristides took great pride in the fact that he had delivered speeches from his sickbed , regarding his ill-health not as a handicap, even stating in writing that his disease was profitable and that his suffering was a vehicle of his success .

It could be claimed that Aristides was actually a very idle man, and preferred to make himself out to be sick to avoid work of any sort. It could also be argued that it would have been only the actions of an idle person to stay in a temple for two years, achieving nothing of mention. For Aristides spent two years in the Asclepieium at Pergamum, this period of healing, worshipping and learning

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