The theater at Epidaurus is the most acoustically perfect ancient theater surviving in the Greek world, and its perfection is not accidental. The specific geometry of the cavea, 55 rows of limestone seats arranged in the precise circular arc that the architect Polykleitos the Younger calculated in the fourth century BCE, produces the specific acoustic phenomenon that every visitor who drops a coin at the orchestra’s center and hears it clearly at the uppermost row has experienced: the sound that travels from the stage to the back of the theater without amplification, without loss, without the specific distortion that the enclosed or irregular space introduces. The theater holds 14,000 people. The person at the back hears the actor at the front as clearly as the person in the front row.
The theater was built as part of the Asclepion.
This is the detail that the standard presentation of Epidaurus omits or mentions only in passing: the theater at Epidaurus was not a separate civic entertainment facility built near a religious sanctuary. It was a component of the sanctuary complex whose specific therapeutic purpose it served. The ancient understanding of what healing required included the specific requirement that the healing person’s mind and spirit participate in the healing process, and the theater was the specific institution that the Epidaurus sanctuary used to engage the healing person’s mind and spirit in the most concentrated available form.
The greatest theater ever built was built as a hospital’s therapeutic annex.
Asclepius and the Specific Theology of Healing
Asclepius was the son of Apollo and the mortal Koronis, whose specific birth and early biography the Apollo article in this collection develops through the specific tragic sequence of the mother’s infidelity and death and the child’s rescue from the funeral pyre. The specific divine inheritance that Asclepius received from his father was the inheritance of the Apollonian rational order applied to the specific domain of the body’s relationship to illness and recovery: the son of the god of light and medicine became the specific divine being whose domain was the organized practice of the healing art.
The Asclepius tradition’s specific theological character is the character that distinguishes it from the general divine healing traditions of the ancient world: Asclepius was not simply a god who healed the sick through divine intervention in the way that any powerful deity could be petitioned to intervene in the affairs of the mortal. He was the divine being whose specific domain was the organized knowledge and practice of medicine, whose sanctuaries were the specific institutions that maintained the accumulated empirical knowledge of the healing tradition alongside the specific ritual practices of the divine healing, and whose specific relationship to Hippocrates and the rational medical tradition was the relationship of the divine patron to the human professional tradition that claimed descent from the divine healer’s lineage.
The Hippocratic tradition whose pharmakeia article in this collection develops through the specific botanical and pharmacological knowledge of Theophrastus and the ancient Greek medical tradition claimed descent from Asclepius through the specific genealogical connection between the Hippocratic medical families and the divine healer’s lineage. The physicians of the Hippocratic tradition called themselves Asclepiads, the descendants of Asclepius, and the specific claim that the rational medical tradition was the humanized continuation of the divine healing art was the claim that gave the ancient Greek medical tradition its specific theological foundation.
The snake whose specific character as the chthonic symbol of renewal and the underworld boundary the Hekate and the August fifteenth articles in this collection develop was Asclepius’s specific sacred animal: the snakes that the ancient Asclepieia kept in their sanctuary precincts were the specific material presences of the divine healer’s power, and the specific healing tradition of allowing the sacred snakes to move among the sleeping patients in the enkoimesis hall was the specific ritual expression of the Asclepian healing power’s material presence in the sanctuary space.
The Enkoimesis | Sleeping Toward the Cure
The specific healing mechanism of the ancient Asclepion was the enkoimesis, the sacred sleep, the ritual incubation whose specific practice was the practice that distinguished the Asclepion from the ordinary medical facility and that gave the ancient healing sanctuary its specific religious character.
The person who came to the Epidaurus Asclepion seeking healing did not simply arrive, consult a physician, receive a prescription, and depart. The specific process of the Asclepian healing required a preparation whose duration and specific content varied with the condition of the supplicant and the specific requirements of the sanctuary tradition: the ritual purification, the dietary restrictions, the specific offerings to Asclepius and his associated divine figures, and the preliminary consultation with the sanctuary’s priests whose specific knowledge of the Asclepian healing tradition allowed them to prepare the supplicant for the specific encounter with the divine healing power that the enkoimesis was designed to produce.
The enkoimesis itself was the ritual sleep in the specific space of the abaton, the sacred dormitory whose specific character as the enclosed and darkened space where the sleeping supplicant would receive the divine healing communication through the medium of the dream gave the sanctuary its most distinctive architectural element. The supplicant who slept in the abaton was the supplicant who had completed the specific preparation that the sanctuary required, and the dream that the prepared supplicant received in the abaton was the specific communication whose content the sanctuary’s priests then interpreted as the specific therapeutic guidance that the individual supplicant’s condition required.
The surviving inscriptions from the Epidaurus sanctuary, the iamata, the records of miraculous healings that the sanctuary maintained and displayed for the instruction and encouragement of arriving supplicants, are among the most remarkable documentary records of the ancient healing tradition in the specific form of the case histories whose content ranges from the plausible, the resolution of a skin condition through the dream-prescribed dietary change, to the extraordinary, the restoration of sight to the blind, to the miraculous, the healing of conditions that no ancient medical treatment could have addressed.
The specific character of the iamata as both the documentary record of the sanctuary’s healing tradition and the institutional propaganda whose specific function was to encourage the arriving supplicant’s faith in the healing process is the character that makes them both the most direct evidence of what actually occurred at the Asclepion and the most challenging evidence to interpret: the boundary between the documented and the embellished in the iamata is the boundary that the ancient tradition did not maintain in the way that the contemporary medical record would require.
The modern scholarship’s most honest engagement with the enkoimesis tradition is the engagement that the Oropos Amphiaraus article in this collection takes toward the specific Amphiaraus oracle sanctuary’s dream incubation practice: the specific combination of the ritual preparation, the altered state produced by the fasting and the purification and the specific sensory conditions of the abaton’s darkness and enclosure, and the specific psychological state of the person who has traveled to the sanctuary specifically to receive a healing communication, produces the specific conditions under which the dream’s content is most likely to address the specific concern that brought the supplicant to the sanctuary. The religious and the psychological dimensions of the enkoimesis are not alternatives. They are the same process described in different vocabularies.
The Sanctuary Complex and Its Architecture
The Epidaurus Asclepion was not simply the theater and the abaton. It was a complete sanctuary complex whose multiple buildings and spaces served the specific functions of the different stages of the healing process, from the initial arrival and purification through the enkoimesis to the recovery and departure.
The Tholos, the circular building whose specific architectural complexity has made it among the most studied buildings in ancient Greek architecture, occupied the sanctuary’s center and served a function whose specific content the ancient sources do not unambiguously describe: the most widely accepted interpretation is that the Tholos served as the specific housing for the sacred snakes of the Asclepian tradition, the underground circular passages beneath the building’s floor providing the specific habitat that the snakes required while the building’s upper structure served the specific ceremonial function whose architectural elaboration the Tholos’s specific design complexity required. The Tholos’s architect was also Polykleitos the Younger, the same architect who designed the theater, and the specific architectural ambition of both buildings is the ambition of the same designer working on the complete sanctuary complex as a single integrated architectural project.
The gymnasium, the stoa, the propylon, the temples of Asclepius and Artemis and Aphrodite, and the stadium whose specific athletic function the Asclepian games whose organization the sanctuary maintained served, all formed the complete spatial program of the sanctuary whose specific integration of the therapeutic, the religious, the athletic, and the theatrical functions expressed the ancient understanding of what healing was and what it required.
The ancient Greek understanding of health was the understanding that the Epidaurus sanctuary’s architectural program expressed in built form: the healthy person was the person whose specific combination of the body’s physical condition, the mind’s rational order, the spirit’s relationship to the divine, and the community’s social integration was the condition of the flourishing life that the Greek tradition called eudaimonia. The sanctuary that served the healing of the unhealthy person was the sanctuary that provided the specific conditions for the restoration of each of these dimensions simultaneously: the therapeutic waters and the enkoimesis for the body, the theater for the mind and the spirit, the athletic competition of the Asclepian games for the physical training, and the communal feast of the sanctuary’s festival for the social reintegration.
The theater was not an entertainment facility added to a medical complex. The medical complex was designed around the understanding that the theater was part of the therapy.
What the Theater Did
The specific therapeutic function of the theater at the Epidaurus Asclepion is the function whose ancient theoretical foundation the Aristotelian concept of catharsis articulates: the specific emotional experience produced by the tragic drama, the specific combination of the pity and the terror that the witnessing of the tragic hero’s fall produces in the audience, was understood in the ancient tradition as the specific emotional experience whose therapeutic consequence was the specific purification of the emotions that Aristotle named catharsis.
The catharsis concept has been among the most contested in the entire history of literary and theatrical theory, and the specific content of what Aristotle meant by the purification of the emotions through the tragic drama is a question whose full resolution the scholarly tradition has not achieved. But the most direct reading, the reading whose specific content fits most naturally into the therapeutic context of the Epidaurus sanctuary complex, is the reading that understands catharsis as the specific process by which the emotions that the sick person has been unable to process or express in the ordinary context of their illness find a safe and organized outlet through the specific medium of the theatrical performance: the grief and the fear and the anger and the despair that the person whose body is failing or whose condition is chronic or whose prognosis is uncertain carries but cannot express in the ordinary context of their daily life are the emotions that the tragic drama gives a specific organized form to and that the audience experiences in the specific safe medium of the fiction whose consequences are not the audience member’s own.
The sick person who sits in the theater at Epidaurus and watches Oedipus discover what he has done, or watches Hecuba process the destruction of everything she loved, or watches Philoctetes on his island with his wound that will not heal, is the sick person whose own condition is given a specific form and a specific narrative by the theatrical experience whose characters carry the emotions that the audience member’s own condition produces but whose specific theatrical medium provides the specific distance that allows the emotion to be experienced and released without the specific overwhelming quality that the direct encounter with one’s own condition in one’s own life produces.
The theater at Epidaurus with its perfect acoustics carried every word of the tragic text to every person in the 14,000-seat cavea with the specific clarity whose specific quality was itself the theatrical experience’s first effect: the person in the back row heard every word, which meant that every person in the theater experienced the same text at the same time with the same clarity, and the specific communal character of the theatrical experience was the specific social dimension of the therapeutic process that the enkoimesis’s individual isolation in the abaton could not provide.
The individual healing in the abaton and the communal healing in the theater were the two poles of the Epidaurus therapeutic program: the specific encounter with the divine in the solitude of the sacred sleep, and the specific encounter with the human condition in the community of the theatrical audience.
Epidaurus and the Contemporary Visitor
The Epidaurus archaeological site is one of the most significant in the Greek world and one of the most complete: the specific combination of the theater, which is in active use for summer theatrical performances, and the sanctuary complex, whose multiple buildings the ongoing excavations of the Greek Archaeological Service have been revealing since the nineteenth century, gives the visitor the specific experience of the ancient sacred space in its most complete surviving form.
The theater’s acoustic demonstration, the coin dropped at the orchestra’s center, is the demonstration that every guide performs and that every visitor performs after the guide has left: the specific experience of the sound traveling through the space with the clarity that the mathematics of the design produces is the experience that most directly connects the contemporary visitor to the specific achievement of Polykleitos the Younger’s design. The experience is not diminished by being a demonstration. It is the demonstration that gives the abstract architectural achievement its specific sensory reality.
The sanctuary complex below the theater, whose signage and the small on-site museum connect the visible architectural remains to the specific functions they served, requires the specific attention of the visitor who has prepared by reading the iamata and understanding the enkoimesis tradition: the abaton’s foundations, the Tholos’s circular base, the propylon’s massive threshold, are the remains of buildings whose specific function the archaeological context does not communicate without the specific knowledge that the preparation provides.
The summer theatrical performances at the Epidaurus theater, organized by the Athens Epidaurus Festival whose program includes ancient drama in Greek and in translation as well as contemporary productions that the theater’s international reputation attracts, are the most direct available experience of the ancient theatrical tradition in the space for which ancient theater was designed. The specific acoustic perfection of the theater gives the ancient text its specific sonic quality in the specific space whose design the ancient architect produced for the specific purpose of making the tragic text maximally available to the maximal number of people simultaneously.
The person who attends a performance of Sophocles at Epidaurus in the summer evening, in the theater whose limestone seats hold the warmth of the August day and whose acoustic perfection carries the ancient text to the back row with the clarity that Polykleitos the Younger’s mathematics produced, is the person who is most directly experiencing the ancient therapeutic program in the form that the ancient architects designed it to be experienced: the community gathered in the specific space of the healing sanctuary to hear the specific text whose emotional content the communal experience of the theatrical performance produces and organizes.
The cure is not guaranteed. It never was. But the specific combination of the ancient space and the ancient text and the communal experience in the specific acoustic perfection of the most carefully designed theater ever built is the combination whose specific quality the sanctuary’s architects understood when they placed the theater at the center of the healing complex.
The greatest theater ever built was built as a hospital’s therapeutic annex. Attending a performance at Epidaurus is attending the theater in the specific context for which the ancient architects intended it.
At Olympus Estate, Wanderlust Greece guides you across the sacred and storied terrain of the Hellenic world. The theater at Epidaurus holds 14,000 people and a coin dropped at the orchestra’s center is heard clearly at the back row. It was built as part of the healing sanctuary. The enkoimesis was the ritual sleep in the darkened abaton where the prepared supplicant received the healing dream whose content the sanctuary’s priests then interpreted. The iamata inscriptions recorded the miraculous cures and encouraged the arriving supplicant’s faith. The sacred snakes moved through the sanctuary. The Tholos at the center was probably their home. The catharsis of the tragic drama was part of the therapy. The theater’s acoustic perfection was the specific quality that made the communal emotional experience maximally available to the maximum number of sick people simultaneously. The Athens Epidaurus Festival performs ancient drama here every summer. The limestone seats still hold the August warmth. Attend a performance.
