ABSTRACT
Sometime during his travels in the second century AD, the Greek writer Pausanias visited the Asklepieion sanctuary at Epidauros. Nestling among the surrounding mountains, the sacred grove had long been considered the healing god’s pre-eminent shrine and hospital. Pausanias admired the tholos, theatre and temple and the ivory and gold cult statue of Asklepios carved by Thrasymedes of Paros. Within the enclosure, he stopped to read six ancient stone tablets inscribed in Doric (2.27). The geographer Strabo had seen them two centuries earlier, and reported other such tablets at Kos and Trikka (Geog. 8.16.15). The inscriptions were dedications by men and women honouring Asklepios for curing them of physical disabilities and debilitating diseases.
