Bronwen L. Wickkiser, Classics, Wabash College, Indiana
“Healing, Space, and Musical Performance in Late Classical Greece: The Thymele at Epidauros”

In the fourth century BCE, the citizens of Epidauros, a small polis in the Peloponnese, launched a massive building program at the nearby, much visited healing sanctuary of the god Asklepios, son of Apollo. In terms of labor, design, and expense, the most impressive and sophisticated structure belonging to this program was a mysterious round building located at the very center of the sanctuary, a building known from ancient sources as the thymele.

Since its excavation in the nineteenth century, archaeologists have proposed a wide range of interpretations for this building, such as that it was Asklepios’s tomb, or a council house, a dining hall, an astronomical tool, or a library. A curious hole at the center of the thymele’s floor opened into unique, labyrinthine foundations. This substructure has been interpreted as a well, an offering pit, a maze through which worshippers wandered like initiates in a mystery cult, or a residence for Asklepios’s sacred snakes.

In this talk, we will explore another potential solution to the mystery of the thymele’s form and function. I will suggest that this building served as a space for musical performance, and that this sacred music fulfilled a therapeutic role at the heart of Asklepios’s most famous healing sanctuary.

Bronwen L. Wickkiser

Dr. Bronwen L. Wickkiser is the Theodore Bedrick Associate Professor of Classics at Wabash
College in Indiana. Much of her research focuses on religion and medicine in Greek and Roman antiquity, especially as evident in the cult of the healing god Asklepios. Wickkiser’s first book, Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece (Johns Hopkins 2008) argues that medical and political factors together fueled the cult’s rapid rise in popularity as worshippers sought a capable healer for the body politic as well as the physical body. A new project explores references to the classical past in the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and the complex relationships between religious and civil liberty in our nation’s not too distant, classically leaning past. Wickkiser is the recipient of numerous fellowships from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America-Milwaukee Society and the Departments of FLL-Classics, Anthropology and Art History at UWM. It is free and open to the public and followed by free refreshments.