An Embodied Reading of Epiphanies in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales

This article focuses on the Sacred Tales (henceforth ST), Aelius Aristides’ first-person account of his terrible diseases and subsequent healing brought about by Asclepius, and sheds new light on this text with the help of the notion of embodiment. In recent decades the ST has received a great deal of attention:1 scholars have offered two main readings of this work, oscillating between the poles of religion and rhetoric. Some have read the ST as an aretalogy2 while others have emphasised the rhetorical aims of this text and its connection with Second Sophistic literature.3 My article focuses on Aristides’ epiphanic dreams of Asclepius. Previous studies have considered these passages to be part of the traditional Greek epiphanic discourse, one in which, as argued by Verity Platt, ‘the visual sense tends to predominate’.4 This focus on sight in the epiphanic tradition matches the importance of seeing in the Greek religious practice: in ancient Greece sacred sites were visited in order to see the god.5 My study, however, argues that these passages, by focusing on the narrator’s interactive and multisensorial perception of Asclepius, are especially vivid because they present Aristides’ perception of the god as embodied and enactive rather than purely visual (I explain these terms below). In the second part of this article, I turn my attention to the ancient readers of the ST: although the linguistic mediation prevents any literary account of epiphany from conveying a full experience of the divine, with the help of narratorial comments Aristides’ dreams of Asclepius bring readers close to gaining it. Overall, this article confirms from a new angle the relevance of religion and rhetoric to the understanding of the ST, as well as suggesting that the body might play a more important role than usually thought in the ancient response to epiphanies.