Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales: a dream diary of the second century
Aelius Aristides, a Greek orator of the second century, told in his Sacred Tales of dreams sent by Asclepius at Pergamon: a unique record of faith.
Almost everything we know about ancient incubation comes from inscriptions, comedies or treatises written from the outside. There is, however, one text in which a man tells in the first person, over many years, of his night-time relationship with a god. It is the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides, a Greek orator who lived in the second century AD, one of the most remarkable documents in all of ancient literature.
A famous and ailing orator
Publius Aelius Aristides was born in Mysia, in Asia Minor, around AD 117, and became one of the most celebrated orators of the so-called Second Sophistic, the movement that revived Greek eloquence under the Roman Empire. His speeches, including a eulogy of Rome much studied by historians, were admired throughout the Greek world.
Young and already promising, he fell seriously ill during a journey to Rome around the middle of the century. There then began a long period of ailments that accompanied him for most of his life. Aristides entrusted himself to Asclepius and stayed for long periods in the god's great sanctuary at Pergamon, frequented by intellectuals, physicians and notables, where he spent years marked by dreams and visions.
Six books of dreams
The Sacred Tales, in Greek Hieroi Logoi, consist of six books, the last of which remained unfinished. Aristides states that he recorded his dreams for a long time and rearranged those memories in later life. The narrative does not follow a strictly chronological order: it moves from one night to another, from a journey to an illness, from an appearance of the god to an oratorical triumph.
In the dreams he narrates, Asclepius gives him often surprising orders: baths in rivers in the depths of winter, fasts, sudden journeys, but also the call to return to composing and speaking in public. Aristides interprets every prescription as the sign of a personal protection. Historians read these pages as the testimony of a faith, not as a medical treatise, and that is how they should be read.
A document for historians
The value of the Sacred Tales lies in their intimacy. For the first time an ancient author describes the sensations of the sleeper, fear and expectation, the dialogue with a god felt to be present and affectionate. In the last century the scholar Eric Robertson Dodds saw in them an example of the religious anxiety of the imperial age, while others have stressed the link between illness, fame and the author's identity.
The text is also precious for what it tells us about the Asclepieion of Pergamon, whose porticoes, springs, priests and visitors it describes. Roman senators, philosophers and other distinguished pilgrims appear in it, a sign that the sanctuary was also a meeting place for the educated elite. The ruins, excavated by German archaeologists from the twentieth century onwards, still make it possible to recognise many of the places mentioned.
Aristides died around AD 180, convinced that he owed his survival and his career to the god. His diary, written with the care of a great stylist of Greek prose, remains one of the most direct voices through which antiquity speaks to us of dreams not as an object of theory, but as an experience lived night after night.