Those few Romans who were able to find and afford a physician may well have subsequently regretted it, since many ancient ‘cures’ were arguably more alarming than the ailment.(Pg.37)
Small wonder, then, that when doctors’ advice proved too expensive or too elusive – or too appalling – people turned elsewhere for help. For, when doctors failed, the gods might step in. Ancient holy men could not merely raise the dead, they were able to perform any number of lesser miracles, too. Jesus, or so his followers liked to say, was able to heal the sick, cure the lame and make the blind see. But, as Celsus and others pointed out, such claims were commonplace. Walk into any town in the east of the empire and there you could find any number of men who ‘profess to do wonderful miracles’ and ‘who, for a few obols, make known their sacred lore in the middle of the marketplace and drive daemons out of men and blow away diseases’ and even bring things back to life – or at least they made it look as though they had.6
It is hard to remember today, now that religion and healthcare have been split asunder by science into almost entirely separate realms, that in the ancient world they were intimately intertwined. Read the ancient poets, and they will tell you that Mount Olympus resounded with the noise of divine squabbles and heavenly seductions. Archaeology tells a very different story. Look at the prayers, petitions and offerings left in temple after temple and it seems far more likely that the cloudy reaches of Olympus echoed instead with the pleas of the sick; with the sound of people begging the gods to smooth their leprous skin, heal their gouty knees, safely deliver their babies and, in one particularly anguished case, to heal a mysteriously injured ‘member’ whose owner was too embarrassed to go to a doctor. Dig through the remains of many ancient temples and you will find thousands of tiny models of body parts – of legs and wombs and breasts and feet and eyes – formed out of stone and clay: offerings left in the hope that the temple’s divine inhabitants might see the troubles of this mortal clay and mend them.* A great deal of all ancient religion was little more than healthcare with a halo.
Modern readers often fail to notice this. European literature might have begun with a plague in the opening lines of the Iliad, but on the whole the spots and pimples, seizures and sicknesses of ordinary men and women did not trouble the pens of ancient historians.7 Or indeed of modern ones: historians tend to prefer grander topics than a painful attack of piles or a troublesome bout of diarrhoea. But they were there, these illnesses, and they mattered. In truth, though historians disdain them, they also mattered to the grand sweep of history, too. Sickness could – and frequently did – lay low an army as effectively as the slings and arrows of the enemy. Indeed, the army need not even be that sick. Read letters from soldiers posted in the north of England in the first century AD and it becomes clear that a large proportion of them had been laid up in the sick bay by a condition they called ‘blear-eye’, a disease that caused the eyelids to become inflamed. Not something that features in the more martial narratives of Caesar or Tacitus.
The ancient fascination with medicine can be seen clearly in other genres that have managed to last the centuries. We have precious few texts from the Roman Empire: it is estimated that less than 1 per cent of all Latin literature survives today.8 Those works that do remain hint at what captured the interest of the copiers – and medical texts loom large. It has been estimated that fully 10 per cent of the Greek literature that survives from before AD 350 are medical texts by the surgeon Galen. (Pg.39)
“Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God” by Catherine Nixey. https://a.co/f3FnpTG
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc.
Travel in Life 