Dreams in Late Antiquity

By January of 149 C.E., the date of this dream-induced plunge into a river in Smyrna, Aelius Aristides had already had three and a half years’ experience of what he called “wintry, divine, and very strange baths.”² These baths were part of the god Asclepius’ response to Aristides’ physical complaints: “I had catarrhs and difficulty with my palate, and everything was full of frost and fire, and among many other various difficulties, my stomach trouble was at its peak.”³ Following the particular bath just described, Aristides reported that his body had achieved a state of peaceful equilibrium matched by a contented frame of mind:

During the rest of the day and night till bed time, I preserved the condition which I had after the bath, nor did I feel any part of my body to be drier or moister. None of the warmth abated, none was added, nor again was the warmth such as one would have from a human contrivance, but it was a certain continuous body heat, producing the same effect throughout the whole of my body and during the whole time. My mental state was also nearly the same. For there was neither, as it were, conspicuous pleasure, nor would you say that it was like a human joy. But there was a certain inexplicable contentment. . . . Thus I was wholly with the god.⁴

Having come through the dream and the river, Aristides’ painful physical sensation of frost and fire had been transformed into a rosy hue; a warm sense of well-being that was emotional as well as physical had replaced the feverish shivers of ill health.

What is one to make of this “pink professor,” as Peter Brown has dubbed the post-bath Aristides?⁵ It is difficult to decide whether the conditions of Aristides’ life provoked his prolific dreaming, or whether his dreams “produced” his life. Perhaps it is a case of oscillation between both. What is undeniable, however, is that Aristides’ long-term oneiric association with the healing god Asclepius made a dramatic impact on his body. Aristides’ body, indeed, provided the “ground” upon which his oneiric experiences were constructed. This chapter will explore one late-antique person’s involvement with Asclepian therapy, a form of oneiric healing which focused on the human body.⁶ I will argue that, in this particular case, the body was a medium for the expression of self-identity, and, as such, it was both the raw material and the trope of the “I.” As a metaphorical substance, Aristides’ body, hedged about by dreams, was both metaphor and substance of his sense of himself.

As one whose aspirations toward a renewed physical self had implications for perceptions of the inner self as well, Aristides was not unique in his culture. Under the rubric of “the care of the self,” Michel Foucault has identified one of the ways in which the raw material of bodily symptoms came to be used as icons of personal identity. He traces the development, in the first centuries of the Graeco-Roman era, of what he calls “the cultivation of the self wherein relations of oneself to oneself were intensified and valorized.”⁷ One type of self-cultivation was the following of a medical regimen, and simultaneously, the production of narratives of illness. There were, in Foucault’s words, “inducements to acknowledge oneself as being ill or threatened by illness,” in part because the increased concern for the self’s well-being was correlated with medical thought: “everyone must discover that he is in a state of need.”⁸ Physical symptoms and bodily dysfunctions took on the huge importance that they did because, in a culture that was theoretically soul-oriented, such bodily symptoms functioned as signs of threats to the soul, that is, threats to the integrity of one’s self-identity.⁹

Bodies, then, could function as psychic texts, with their “petty miseries,” as Foucault calls them, operating as concretizations of the self’s hopes and fears.¹⁰ It is in this context that the case of Aelius Aristides belongs. An orator who was frequently ill, Aristides was proud of having delivered speeches from his sickbed.¹¹ He regarded his physical ailments not as “petty miseries” but as virtual tempests, yet he stated in writing more than once that his disease was profitable.¹² Indeed, he quoted a fellow orator as having said of him “that I had become ill through some divine good fortune.”¹³ The questions that need asking about such a statement are these: how could a tempestuously sick body be a sign of divine good fortune? what kind of desire found concrete expression in Aristides’ body?

Aelius Aristides was born in late November of 117 C.E. on the family estate in northern Mysia in the Roman province of Asia.¹⁴ The family had been granted Roman citizenship by the emperor Hadrian, and its members were also citizens of Smyrna, the preeminent city of coastal Asia Minor.¹⁵ As the son of a family of wealth and status, Aristides was welleducated and studied in Smyrna, Pergamum, and Athens with some of the most famous sophists of the era, among them Polemo and Claudius Herodes.¹⁶ Unfortunately, the promising oratorical career of this young man of privilege and talent was blighted by illness. First striken while on a tour of Egypt in 142, Aristides was to struggle with physical afflictions for the rest of his life.

Perhaps the most poignant of these early bouts with disease came on the eve of his departure for Rome in December of 143. Ill with a cold, he left for the imperial city anyway; no doubt the prospect of dazzling the court with his oratorical powers and so establishing his reputation in circles of political and social influence overpowered bodily discomfort.¹⁷ “I set out for Rome in the middle of winter,” he reports, “although I was sick right at the start . . . [but] I paid no heed to my present ailments, but trusted to the training of my body and to my general good luck.”¹⁸ His training and his luck did not hold. Instead, he felt that his teeth were about to fall out, his throat was so constricted that his breathing was blocked, and he choked on his food.¹⁹ Such dysfunctions, centered around the mouth and the throat, made declamation impossible, and they suggest that his speechifying ambition and his body were strongly at odds with each other. Tellingly (as will be seen), his body was beginning to function as the signifying ground of a troubled psyche. “Rome, the stage of his ambitions, became the cemetery of his hopes,” as his biographer Charles Behr has remarked.²⁰ Aristides returned home.

Homecoming did not bring relief. Aristides wrote that “the hardest and most difficult thing of all was that my breathing was blocked. With much effort and disbelief, scarcely would I draw a rasping and shallow breath, and a constant constriction in my throat followed and I had fits of shivering.”²¹ He went to the warm springs just outside Smyrna, but neither their warmth nor the ministrations of doctors proved helpful. It was during his stay at the springs that Aristides received the first of his oneiric revelations from the god Asclepius.²² The dream prescribed a mild form of shock therapy—walking barefoot outside—yet on the basis of this and subsequent dream-remedies, Aristides wrote that he decided “to submit to the god, truly as to a doctor, and to do in silence whatever he wishes.”²³ In the summer of 145, he felt himself called to the temple of Asclepius at Pergamum; here he spent the next two years, a period of his life that he referred to as the Cathedra.²⁴

When Aristides remarked that he had resolved “to do in silence what-ever [Asclepius] wished,” he surely intended the word silence to be understood metaphorically as a gesture of submission and obedience to the god, for he did not remain literally without words. The god commanded him to write down his dreams.²⁵ He recorded them in large parchment books, and he used the memory of what he had written in them when, years later, he wrote The Sacred Tales. This document is a remarkable autobiographical experiment in which oratory, Asclepius and dreams, and Aristides’ body are so thoroughly fused that it is difficult to extricate one from the others. On the face of it, The Sacred Tales are a record of Aristides’ illnesses and the therapeutic dreams that gave him relief; but there is much more as well. From the vantage point of his later years, during which time The Sacred Tales were written, Aristides saw that his body and his career were both gifts of the healing god, produced through the medium of dreams. Even the title of this narrative came from Asclepius, who had said in a dream-appearance to Aristides’ foster father that Aristides’ speeches were “sacred tales.”²⁶ Just as Aristides wrote oratorical speeches, so he also “wrote” his body by recording its miseries and its recoveries in his Asclepian memoirs. Both kinds of writing were associated and in collusion with the oneiric god of health.

Another such association of oratory, dream, and body, less direct but perhaps more telling, comes from the period of the Cathedra in the Asclepieium in Pergamum. Dreaming and aching in a seemingly endless cycle, Aristides composed one of his lengthiest orations. It was an oration in defense of oratory.²⁷ During a time when he was choking, vomiting, unable to breath, with his jaws locked together, and suffering fiery pains in his head and pressure in his temples, Aristides wrote an oration in which he tells a myth about the divine origins of oratory. Ironically, it is a narrative that constructs oratory as the protector of the human body!

According to this myth, in the beginning, when animals and humans were first on the earth, there was disaster for human beings because of the inadequacy of their bodies; not only were they inferior to the large beasts, but “in the fitting out of their body they were inferior not only to sheep but also to snails, since none of them was self-sufficient.”²⁸ Observing that the human race was dying out, Prometheus appealed to Zeus on its behalf, and Zeus ordered Hermes “to go to mankind with the art of oratory”— but only to those with the “strongest and noblest” natures.²⁹ Thus, according to Aristides, “when oratory had come in this way from the gods to mankind, men were able to escape their harsh life with the beasts, and all men everywhere stopped being the enemies of one another, and they discovered the beginning of community” and learned from this gift about the existence of the gods.³⁰ In this elevated view, oratory is the matrix of civilized life: religion, community, and the human body exist in its salvific embrace.

In his discussion of oratory as the founding gesture of civilization, Aristides treats the conjunction of the saved human body with the saving words of oratory in an abstract, impersonal way, even though we, as readers, know from The Sacred Tales that his body was anything but an abstraction as he wrote the myth of oratory. Years later, close to the end of his life, Aristides wrote an oration in honor of Asclepius in which he placed his own body in an aboriginal context. The connection between the myth of oratory just described and this later text is the figure of Prometheus; taken together, these two orations repeat in stunning fashion the confabulation of body, oratory, and Asclepian dreaming that characterizes The Sacred Tales.

The later oration, entitled “An Address Regarding Asclepius,” was delivered, probably in January of 177, during a festival at the temple of Zeus Asclepius in Pergamum.³¹ It is a short treatise that praises the healing act of the god. Aristides notes that many men and women “even attribute to the providence of the god the existence of the limbs of their body, when their natural limbs had been destroyed.”³² But for his part, Aristides says, “it is not only a part of the body, but it is the whole body which [Asclepius] has formed and put together and given as a gift, just as Prometheus of old is said to have fashioned man.”³³ Through the medium of Asclepius, Aristides traces his body back to the Promethean creation of the body. Thus, like oratory, Aristides’ body is aboriginal, and both oratory and his body are gifts of the gods.

There is in Aristides’ writing an insistent thematic move whereby oratorical writing and the symptomatic “writing” of the body function as signs of each other, all under the aegis of Asclepian oneiric practice. Even a gesture seemingly so innocent as Aristides’ choice of the name Cathedra to characterize his two-year stay at the Asclepieium in Pergamum falls under the spell of this associative movement. For, while kathedra certainly means “idleness” or “inactivity,” it also denotes the chair of a teacher, the seat from which one professes.³⁴ This choice of name suggests that Aristides found his profession—his professing voice—not in spite of the illness that had brought him to Asclepius, but in it.

Was his sense of identity an effect of the conflation of his body with oratory and the healing god? It seems clear at the very least that he viewed his body as a site of knowledge and as a medium of thought. In The Sacred Tales, he praised the oneiric presence of Asclepius as having simultaneously raised up his body, strengthened his soul, and increased the glory of his oratorical career.³⁵ Yet, in this triad of body, soul, and oratory, the body is the primary signifying ground, because its symptoms were what originally constituted, and continued to sustain, the divine Asclepian persona that Aristides so cherished.

Contemporary interpreters have connected Aristides’ physical condition with oratory and Asclepian dreaming in a number of ways. Most have been variations on an explanatory strategy that intertwines social and religious data with psychological observations. Aristides is so forcefully present in The Sacred Tales as a distinctive personality that it has been hard to resist bringing him into the clinic for analysis.³⁶

In his study of the “Second Sophistic,” the philological designation of an oratorical movement that coincided with the Antonine age, G. W. Bowersock emphasized the “intensified general interest in the human body and its diseases” that characterized these second-century sophists, Aristides among them.³⁷ The revival of sophistry was part of a wider intellectual renaissance in which medicine, philosophy, and rhetoric were entertained together with equal enthusiasm; particularly notable was the emergence of a close association between medicine, the cult of Asclepius, and oratory.³⁸

In this era, Asclepian religion and medicine could be seen as complementary rather than as competing practices. The eminent physician Galen, whom Bowersock takes to be representative of the second century’s “renaissance men,” reported that he did not, like others, scorn dreams but had in fact performed surgical operations based on oneiric instructions.³⁹ Nor were philosophy and religion opposed: witness the group of litterati with whom Aristides shared both incubation and dreams, as well as philosophical shoptalk, during his stays in the temple compounds of Asclepius.⁴⁰ According to Bowersock, Aristides was a typical, if exaggerated, example of the period’s “hypersensitivity” to bodily care, a hypersensitivity that extended to literature and Asclepian religion as well. Giving this intellectual movement a psychological twist, Bowersock concludes that there is “abundant and often disagreeable evidence for an inordinate obsession with bodily ailments which has to be denominated hypochondria.”⁴¹

While Bowersock has situated Aristides within the context of the most important literary movement of his age, Peter Brown arrives at his understanding of the man in terms of the Antonine age, the period’s political and social designation. As Brown notes, scholarly estimations of this age have tended to be extravagant and negative. It has been called an “age of in-dolence and “impenitent extroversion” in which “an excess of public life” caused “emotional deprivation.”⁴² It has been described as a “pathologically traditionalist” society “whose energies were wasted on externals: by trivialization, by pedantry, by showmanship. . . .”⁴³ Disagreeing with these evaluations, Brown replaces them with the following characterization: the Antonine age was an age of “delicate equipoise” between the competitive ambitions of individuals and the collective life of towns and cities.⁴⁴

In contrast to negative estimations of this period, Brown offers a functionalist model for understanding the cultural milieu of people like Aristides:

Features that have struck the historian as oppressively backward-looking or as dangerously superficial take on a different meaning if seen as devices for maintaining an equilibrium. Civic munificence, the studied revival of traditional collective cults and their accompanying ceremonies, emphasis on the commonplaces of classical culture—these were the governors of an engine that was in constant danger of overheating.⁴⁵

Thus Brown discerns among the ambitious elite the presence of a “model of parity” that kept overly strenuous assertions of individual power and superiority in check.⁴⁶

Into this context of an almost-overheated engine, Brown introduces Aelius Aristides, “a hypochondriacal gentleman of indomitable will.”⁴⁷ He is particularly interested in Aristides’ relationship with Asclepius as one with a “stable ideal figure” who provided Aristides with an inner resource for the public expression of a superiority that was not threatening to his peers because it did not entail undue assumptions of actual political and social power.⁴⁸ Hence the oneiric visitations that Aristides received that portrayed him as having equal stature with such figures as Socrates, Sophocles, Demosthenes, Alexander the Great, and others allowed him to nourish and express his ambition without overstepping the bounds of parity so carefully guarded by his social and political equals.⁴⁹ Furthermore, Aristides’ “heat”—the boiling up of his internal “engine”—was kept under control in a literally physical way by the numerous oneiric directions that prescribed lustral uses of water, most strikingly the wintry plunges in rivers of which Aristides was very proud.⁵⁰

Brown concludes that Aristides was “caught on a knife-edge by the demands of a model of parity” and asks the following question: “Did the rising within [Aristides] of a threatening sense of superiority backed by considerable energy and aggression unconsciously help bring on the illnesses and the murderous cures that tied his energy down to a battle with his body, so that Aristides’ overweening ambition was safely locked away in a world of grandiose dreams and visions?”⁵¹ Brown’s estimation that this was indeed the case carries an implicit suggestion that Aristides’ diseased body was the stage upon which specific religious and sociopsychological scenarios were enacted.

The implications of the view of Aristides’ body as a stage that provided space for the dramas of a troubled psyche are made explicit in the two discussions of Aristides that emphasize a psychological approach for interpreting the man and his Sacred Tales. A.-J. Festugière portrayed the case of Aristides as one of a psychological addiction to illness that had religious ramifications. His formulation follows:

Let us imagine a sick man who places all his confidence not in a doctor, but in a god. The god appears before him at night, gives him directions, usually paradoxical, which amount to a series of ordeals. That he may be closer to the god, the sick man takes up residence in the sanctuary itself. . . . The sick man obeys all orders blindly; and, since the imagination plays a large part in certain chronic illnesses, particularly when the patient is of a nervous temperament, the orders actually do him good, bodily and especially mentally. They help him; but he is not cured. Better say: they help him, and therefore he is not cured, because fundamentally he does not want to be cured. To be cured would mean no longer to enjoy the presence and companionship of the god; and precisely what the patient needs most is the companionship of the god. . . . Thus he comes to be no longer able to do without the god, and by the same token to be no longer able to do without his sickness.⁵²

In his discussion of the intertwining of illness and religion in the case of Aristides, Festugière is not interested so much in the psychological pathology of this double addiction as he is in cultural inducements to intimate relationships with divine figures. For him, Aristides stands as a paradigmatic instance of Graeco-Roman cultivation of “personal religion.”⁵³

E. R. Dodds agrees that the intensity and duration of Aristides’ relationship with Asclepius is properly interpreted as a “curious symbiosis between man and God.”⁵⁴ However, his understanding of Aristides is thoroughly psychological and unfolds out of his use of Freudian theory to elucidate the self-hatred that he found to have been endemic to the age. Comparing Aristides’ unswerving obedience to the often cruel dream-prescriptions of Asclepius with the “self-inflicted torments” of Christian ascetics, Dodds argues that “for these people the price of health, physical or spiritual, is the unending expiation of an unconscious guilt.”⁵⁵ In Dodds’s view, this guilt stemmed from an introjection of hostile feelings toward the outer world: “resentment against the world becomes, or carries with it, resentment against the ego” and is expressed either by “the purely mental torment inflicted by a too tender conscience” or by “physical acts of self-punishment.”⁵⁶

Aristides’ physically punishing regimen of fasting and vomiting and the icy walks and baths certainly fit Dodds’s description of an unconscious need for self-torment, as do the anxiety dreams of being poisoned and attacked by forces both human and bestial.⁵⁷ Asclepian practice would seem in this case to be a necessary illusion for psychic survival whereby feelings of self-hatred were simultaneously expressed, in the form of dreams—and effaced, by giving them divine sanction. Like Festugière, Dodds argues that Asclepius’ function as the companion of Aristides was crucial to the latter’s emotional well-being, because it released him from the prison of “the dreadful loneliness of the neurotic.”⁵⁸ Particularly significant for Dodds are the oneiric revelations of unity between Aristides and his divine healer, and he concludes his discussion of Aristides by suggesting that the vision of unity is a symbol of “the reconstruction of a broken personality which has found peace through self-identification with the image of an ideal Father.”⁵⁹

Brokenness runs like a leitmotif through all of these discussions of Aristides. Related to the theme of brokenness is the sense that Aristides’ attachment to Asclepius was a sign of his need for a stabilizing figure that might serve as an interior anchor. Yet although these interpreters agree that there is brokenness in Aristides’ story, they differ concerning the cause of that brokenness. Was Aristides’ fragile body a sign of a fragile soul in need of a strong father-figure, as both Dodds and Festugière suggest? Or was his physical misery a means for displacing an inner self that was too strong, as Brown argues? Or, finally, was his hypersensitive attentiveness to his body simply a reflection of a cultural obsession, as Bowersock would have it?

Despite their differing explanations of the etiology of Aristides’ brokenness, these interpreters are united in their dislike of the man. “Brainsick in a not very pleasant way”; grandiose and ambitious; “incredibly vain, profoundly egotistical”: all of these remarks imply that Aristides’ personality has been conceived in terms of psychological ego-inflation. I agree that Aristides presents the interpreter with a scenario of brokenness, but I think that his disease, or perhaps better, his dis-ease, was a sign of a disturbance of identity that was more profound than an exaggerated sense of self-importance. I also would like to position Aristides as a barometer of his culture, but I will argue that, as such, his case reflects both an acceptance of his culture’s values and a rejection of them. Aristides configured his body, his career, and his god in ways that suggest both rebellion against and acceptance of the culture in which he lived.

In that culture, it was not unusual to view the body as a concretization of desire, that is, as a material expression of inner drives. Irenaeus, a contemporary of Aristides, could even use this idea sarcastically when he described the Gnostic view of the creation of the world as a materialization of the passions of Wisdom, mythologically conceived as the feminine Sophia.⁶⁰ In the medical literature of the time, care of the body was one of the practices of concern for the self, as Foucault has shown.⁶¹ Doctors offered detailed regimens for eating, sexual intercourse, and exercise, all aimed at balancing the humours and so ensuring tranquility of the spirit. Moderation and self-control were key ingredients in the manner in which Aristides’ culture “produced” the body. As Brown has observed, “we are dealing with men whose gait must be measured, whose gestures were controlled, and who were advised by Plutarch in his Advice on Keeping Well to maintain their health by reading aloud from harmoniously composed declamations, and to avoid ‘passionate and convulsive vociferations’ of any kind.”⁶²

Yet as detailed as were these practices that circumscribed the body for its own, and its psyche’s, good, it was nonetheless the case that undue attentiveness to the body was not commended.⁶³ In this context of restrained body and modulated desire, Aristides’ affirmation of his sick, out-of-balance body as providential, his flamboyant attentiveness to his body’s every woe, and his conviction that that very body was the constant object of his divine oneiric patron’s concern, all stand out in sharp relief. Aristides’ gaze at his own body appears to be an aggressive expression of self-identity when viewed against the backdrop of a culture recommending moderation.

If Aristides’ narrative production of his body in his dreams and in The Sacred Tales that record them is read as a countercultural gesture, it presents the oddity of an identity being forged in the midst of its own destruction. The symptomatic speech of Aristides’ body displays an identity that is dying and being born at once. As an icon of a self in the midst of reformulation, no one of Aristides’ symptoms speaks more clearly, and more abjectly, than does his vomiting. In The Sacred Tales, Aristides presents his vomiting both as a sign of his illness and as a practice of his cure. Particularly telling is his understanding of the need to expel as a token of Asclepius’ oneiric care.⁶⁴ As his body was emptied, so his sense of himself was expelled and refashioned. Dreams provided both the visualization and the technique for activating a change in self-understanding.

In the section of The Sacred Tales in which the practice of vomiting is most prominent, Aristides recorded two dreams that attest to the inner struggle to which his body was giving expression. In the first, he dreams that he is in the temple of Asclepius. “I examined [in this temple] a statue of me. At one time I saw it as if it were of me, and again it seemed to be a great and fair statue of Asclepius. Then I recounted to Zeno himself these things which appeared in my dream. And the part about the statue seemed to be very honorable.”⁶⁵ In this straightforward fantasy of identification, Aristides sees himself and the god as interchangeable figures. Such a vision of the merging of the human with the divine certainly lends itself to the psychology of ego-inflation that has so often been applied to Aristides, but another view is possible as well. I suggest that Aristides’ ego, his “I”, is not inflated in this dream; it is replaced. The “I” marks in the dream the place where the other speaks. Significantly, this “other” is a figure of healing, and it is also a figure of intimacy, manifesting its presence in the condition of the dreamer’s own body. This dream of identity with the god—and it is not the only one—suggests that Aristides no longer construed his identity in terms of a public persona.⁶⁶ Furthermore, his culture’s view of the well-tuned body as a nexus of social relations and as a literal embodiment of civic order was also expelled as Aristides’ sick body took him literally and figuratively inside the temple, where his body was an oneiric gift of the god, and out of the public arena.⁶⁷

These two statements are true—but not quite. For Aristides’ story is suggestive of a struggle between conflicting cultural tendencies—one in the direction of the private, the introspective, and the ascetic, and the other in the direction of the public and of the duties and rewards of civic life. The fact is that the temple, while competing with the forum, had not yet replaced it in Aristides’ view of himself. Evidence for the continuing appeal of public visibility for Aristides’ sense of himself can be found in the second of the two dreams that have significance in the context of Aristides’ physical condition of vomiting. Only eleven days following the dream of identity with the god, Aristides saw this dream: “As if my birthday were approaching, I sent servants to the Temple [of Asclepius] conveying certain offerings, and I also wrote down inscriptions on that which they conveyed. And I used artifice for the sake of a good omen, so that I might succeed in all that is needed in speaking.”⁶⁸ This dream, which calls attention to itself as a metaphor for the dawn of new possibilities (as though it were my birthday), shows that Aristides had not abandoned his hope for success in oratory, his chosen field and certainly one of the most public of late-antique professions. Yet it appears that those very hopes were making him sick. If, nonetheless, Aristides hoped for the rebirth of his career out of the ruins of his body, it was to be a new creation under the auspices of Asclepius. The temple had not replaced the forum, but it had redefined it, and Aristides began to view his speeches as virtual dictations of the god. As he says in his oration to Asclepius, “I say that I am the actor of your compositions. For you yourself have exhorted me to oratory and have guided my training.”⁶⁹

In the oration in defense of oratory that Aristides composed during his first stay in a temple of Asclepius, oratory was presented as that which had both saved the human body from destruction and brought knowledge of the gods to human consciousness. In The Sacred Tales, written after long years of oneiric experience, oratory is no longer the originary term; it is Asclepius. Now the god gives both body and speech. This shift in allegiance is a sign of the deep disturbance of Aristides’ identity, and it is also an emblem of the cultural dis-ease that I think Aristides was suffering. To understand this shift, a further exploration of the practice of oratory, and Aristides’ relation to it, is necessary.

In a study of the role of physiognomy in constructing paradigms of masculinity in the second century C.E., Maud Gleason has shown the keen attention that upper-class males paid to details of physical appearance and deportment.⁷⁰ The glitter, color, and movement of the eyes; the shape of the neck; the tone of the voice; the gait; the gestures of the arms—all of these features of the surface of the body were used to make judgments about a man’s character. According to Gleason, the physiognomical handbooks that provided guides for making such “inferences from human surfaces to human depths” provide evidence for “a technology of suspicion that evolved inside what we lightly call today the ‘face-to-face society’ of the ancient Mediterranean city. To enter this face-to-face society is in fact to enter a forest of eyes—a world in which the scrutiny of one’s fellow man was not an idle pastime but an essential survival skill.”⁷¹ This intense scrutiny to which men were subjected, making them vulnerable to the pressure of the public gaze, was especially evident in the field of oratory. Deviations from the cultural norm of the “impeccably poised gentleman” could have real consequences for the social and political aspirations of orators: if one did not “walk like a lion,” could he declaim before emperors and win their friendship and patronage?⁷²

As Amy Richlin has shown, “the wholesale manufacture of scurrilous propaganda was a favorite Roman political activity,” and some of this political gossip took its cue from sharp-eyed observations about a man’s physical presence in determining whether he measured up to proper standards of the manly man.⁷³ In Aristides’ era, masculinity was an achieved state; it was a “system of signs” that constituted a “language that anatomical males were taught to speak with their bodies.”⁷⁴ Rhetorical training was heavily involved with teaching this body language. As Gleason explains:

The process of forging masculine deportment that could begin as early as infancy continued during literary education, when the linguistic mastery that was the exclusive prerogative of upper-class males was attained under pain of physical punishment at the hands of the grammaticus and under pain of social humiliation in the school of the rhetor. At this stage of their education young men learned, while declaiming, to maintain decorum under conditions of competitive stress. Their instructors also performed publicly in a kind of ritualized cockfighting that mesmerized the leisured elite. From these confrontations emerged the infamous professional quarrels of the sophists, in which their pupils took sides.⁷⁵

Gleason concludes that “competing paradigms of masculinity” were forged in the midst of these rhetorical competitions.⁷⁶

Aristides was not a stranger to these practices of constructing one’s masculinity on the proving ground of rhetoric. Polemo, Smyrna’s most famous orator, was one of his teachers; this man wrote physiognomical handbooks in which the language of the body speaks pointedly about the moral and virile fiber of a man.⁷⁷ In his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus recorded a memorable debate in which this elder contemporary of Aristides participated.

When a quarrel arose between Timocrates and Scopelian, because the latter had become addicted to the use of pitch-plasters and professional hair-removers, the youths who were then residing in Smyrna took different sides, but Polemo, who was the pupil of both men, became one of the faction of Timocrates.⁷⁸

In choosing Timocrates over the hair-free Scopelian, Polemo was following in the train of a cultural bias that “read” practices like depilation as signs of passive homosexuality, a much-derided practice so damaging to one’s masculinity that such men were often described as though they were women.⁷⁹ Polemo favored Timocrates also because of his “headlong style of oratory,” for when he declaimed, “the hair on his head stood up like a lion’s when it springs to the attack.”⁸⁰ As Gleason aptly remarks, “In this contest between hirsute philosophy and depilated rhetoric . . . Polemo chose his paradigm according to physiognomical principles,” because in his own handbook the lion is the theriomorphic sign of dominant masculinity.⁸¹

Evidence in Aristides’ orations suggests that he had learned well his teacher’s physiognomical code for deciphering properly masculine behavior, particularly regarding the practice of oratory. In an oration written during the period of the Cathedra, Aristides describes the inspired speaker as one whose hair stands on end, thus using a leonine metaphor that matches the image approved by Polemo.⁸² He writes in favor of bold and spontaneous speech and pictures the orator as one “from whose very head the goddess [Athena] emits fire.”⁸³ The good orator, Aristides continues, does not posture either with words or gestures to astound his audience, a view that coheres with the physiognomical code of masculine self-possession.⁸⁴

Aristides wrote this oration in self-defense. He had been accused of immoderate pride when, in the course of an earlier speech, he had remarked extemporaneously on the excellence of the speech that he had just delivered.⁸⁵ The images in his lengthy response to this critique are, thus, self-referential; he was constructing his own masculinity as he wrote. Drawing on the theriomorphic lexicon of physiognomy, he compares himself to an eagle, while his opponent is merely a garrulous crow; he is a lion in the face of his critic, a brazen fox.⁸⁶ Turning from animal metaphors of the manly man to human models, Aristides offers a whole catalogue of military and sports heroes as examples of those who justly praise their own abilities, thus linking himself with their masculine prowess.⁸⁷

While Aristides constructed a picture of himself using a code of masculinity, he portrayed his opponents by using a code of femininity. If masculinity was an achieved state, it was achieved at the expense of femininity, which was viewed by the physiognomists and many others as unrelievedly negative. To portray a man as “womanish” was to condemn him. Indeed, the sharpness of the physiognomical gaze in the public “forest of eyes” was honed precisely on detecting such backsliding toward the feminine.⁸⁸ Thus when Aristides describes those who criticize him as jewelry lovers and addicts of the baths, and when he describes his opponents in oratorical contests as men who are “anointed with oil, who carry about palm-leaf fans,” he is drawing on a well-established stock of slurs pointing to the womanish softness of his male competitors.⁸⁹ Aristides reserved his most scathing characterizations for certain unnamed orators who had thrilled their audiences by accompanying their speeches with song and dance. Dancing was considered effeminate in men, and Aristides did not miss his chance to lampoon the competition by pointing out their sophistic pandering to audiences, comparing their performances to “indecent comic dance.”⁹⁰ Drawing explicitly on gender-based jibes, Aristides describes the behavior of such rhetors as like that of hermaphrodites and eunuchs; worse, they are whores and female entertainers, having changed from men into women.⁹¹

Gleason has observed that “norms of masculine behavior were enforced largely through threat of censure and ridicule,” demonstrating that “physiognomical scrutiny belongs to a large-scale coercive social process.”⁹² The comments of Aristides noted above show how biting such censure and ridicule could be, and they also show his eagerness to conform to the masculine norm, not only by constructing himself as possessed of truly masculine prowess but also by constructing his opponents with the damning lexicon of feminine physiognomical traits.

Aristides’ aspiration toward embodying male virtue in the specific arena of his profession, oratory, also expressed itself in his dreams. In one dream, he speaks to the Athenians as though he were Demosthenes, and in another he hears the emperors thank god to have known such a fine orator as he.⁹³ Particularly revealing of the competitiveness within whose purview the norms of conformity assumed their significance is the dream in which Aristides talks to Sophocles: “When we appeared to be at the front door, one of the very distinguished sophists of our time slipped and lay to the left a little apart from the door.” In oneiric revery, the competition lies fallen, while Aristides alone remains to converse with the “handsome old man” Sophocles.⁹⁴ It was only in dreams, however, that Aristides towered over his rhetorical colleagues, and, as readers of The Sacred Tales, we know that Aristides’ desire to comply with the cultural code was realized most fully only in dreams as well. Outside the oneiric realm, his body rejected the demand to conform that was dictated by the coercive social process in which he was enmeshed by virtue of his profession. His body registered nausea. If we take seriously his culture’s view of the body as a psychic text that could both register and reflect threats to self-identity, Aristides’ physical ailments present a text of desire that opposes the desire to conform.

Aristides’ most persistent physical afflictions were a constricted throat, blocked breathing, choking, and vomiting, all of which made the practice of his profession—public speaking—difficult, and sometimes impossible. His body, and then his dreams, and then an inseparable combination of them both removed him from the forest of eyes, from the relentless scrutiny of the public gaze. As a text, Aristides’ body is inscribed with the symptoms of a rebellion against his culture’s construction of masculinity; taken together, these symptoms articulate a desire for the intimacy and privacy that cultural codes denied to men of his standing and profession.

One of the signs of Aristides’ refusal of the public persona required of an orator was his understanding of oratory as a religion. In The Sacred Tales, Aristides prefaces his account of the dream in which he takes on the persona of his rhetorical forebear Demosthenes with the following dream: “I dreamed that I had the clothes of a priest and that I saw the priest himself present. I also dreamed that when I saw one of my friends limping from the region of his seat, I said to him that rest would cure this.”⁹⁵ In quick succession, Aristides’ oneiric visualization of his identity moves from that of an Asclepian priest who dispenses healing advice to that of a legendary orator. Aristides does not elevate either of these oneiric identities over the other in terms of value; both seem satisfying as mirrors of self-understanding.

This juxtaposition of priestly and rhetorical personae in the Sacred Tales is amplified in Aristides’ orations. He gave a speech in which he represented oratory as a mystery religion, pure and sacred. The orator, he wrote, is a mystes, an initiate.⁹⁶ In another oration, the sacral character of the orator is heightened even more: “he preserves a divine trace in himself.”⁹⁷ This view of the orator is quite different from the leonine figure of the masculine code to which Aristides also testified. It is an orator whose calling is not to the public forum but to the private cult. Significantly, Aristides also conceived of the cult of Asclepius as a mystery religion. In the following passage, his embrace of the private over the public is clear:

Neither membership in a chorus, nor the companionship of a voyage, nor having the same teachers, is so great a circumstance, as the gain and profit in having been fellow pilgrims at the Temple of Asclepius and having been initiated in the highest of the rites under the fairest and most perfect Torch-bearer and Mystagogue, and under him to whom every law of necessity yields.⁹⁸

Aristides concludes this oration by observing that, under the protection of Asclepius, he won approval, an approbation “in place of which I would not choose all the so-called felicity of mankind.”⁹⁹ Under the rubric of “mystery religion,” oratory and Asclepian practice are assimilated to each other, although it is the sign of the protecting god that prevails over the limelight of public acclaim.

If the sense of self that was dying on the battleground of Aristides’ body was the self of public visibility, the self that was being born on that body was a self of introspective feeling. What Aristides wanted was warmth. Again and again, he recorded in the Sacred Tales that the dreams of the god and the therapeutic acts prescribed by him gave him warmth, mental contentment, harmony, spiritual strength, and comfort.¹⁰⁰ Not surprisingly, the inner feelings of well-being were also inscribed on his body, in the form of a rosy hue, as we have seen.¹⁰¹ In fact, the oneiric regimens made his body feel light.¹⁰² This sense of physical euphoria, of feeling “light,” was induced not only by dreaming but also by oratory. In the oration in which Aristides defended himself against attack by aligning himself with the physiognomists’ code of the masculine orator, he wrote that oratory instilled warmth and made his body become light; he describes the inspirational effects of oratory on the body with a series of dazzling metaphors that are part of a “secret tale in a religious myth,” thus underscoring once again Aristides’ tendency to construct oratory in terms of religion, Asclepian religion in particular.¹⁰³ Pathetically, these remarks on oratory and bodily buoyancy were written during the Cathedra, Aristides’ first Asclepian sojourn, which was a period of intense physical disability when Aristides’ body was in fact heavy with pain, not soaring like an eagle with wings spread.¹⁰⁴ The lightness given by oratory was a culturally encoded desideratum, not a bodily fact. Unfortunately, the physical and emotional warmth that he desired kept flaring up in the form of bodily fevers and in the form of the hot pursuit of critical competitors in the oratorical forum.

The gap between the cultural ideal of the orator’s vigorous masculine body and the reality of Aristides’ convulsively sick body was bridged by dreams, which offered visions of a new kind of self-understanding that was untouched by the oppressive gaze of the public eye. Aristides’ Sacred Tales give vivid testimony to the way in which dreams could function as vehicles for the “care of the self” in which a person’s self-image was radically transformed. Re-reading his experience and his culture through his dreams, Aristides reached for a more satisfying context within which to construe his sense of himself. One of the most climactic of these oneiric alterations of identity came early on in his relationship with Asclepius; and by his own testimony years later when he recorded this dream in The Sacred Tales, it had given him the courage to live. In August of 147, Aristides dreamed that he was in a temple of Asclepius:

First the cult statue [of Asclepius] appeared to have three heads and to shine about with fire, except for the heads. Next we worshippers stood by it, just as when the paean is sung, I almost among the first. At this point the god, in the posture in which he is represented in his statues, signaled our departure. All the others were going out, and I was turning to go out, and the god, with his hand, indicated for me to stay. And I was delighted by the honor and the extent to which I was preferred to the others, and I shouted out, ‘The One,” meaning the god. But he said, “It is you.”¹⁰⁵

Part of the interest of this dream lies in the henotheistic acclamation of Asclepius as “The One,” a form of address in Graeco-Roman religion that denoted strong personal devotion to a particular god.¹⁰⁶ However, Asclepius’ comment to the oneiric Aristides, “‘It is you,’” is even more remarkable for its explicit statement of identity between the god and his worshiper. If the acclamation “The One” can be applied both to Asclepius and to Aristides, they are then mirror images of each other.

Aristides followed the recording of this dream in The Sacred Tales with narratives of two more dreams that indicate an altered sense of self-identity.

[Asclepius] said that it was fitting that my mind be changed from its present condition, and having been changed, associate with god, and by its association be superior to man’s estate, and that neither was remarkable, either by associating with god, to be superior, or being superior, to associate with god.¹⁰⁷

With his mind thus oneirically “changed from its present condition,” Aristides next dreamed that the god had given him a new name, Theodoras, which means “gift of the god.”¹⁰⁸ These dreams are blatant demonstrations of the dreamer’s desire for change, a change of “association” with the gaining of a new conversation partner, and a change of persona with the bestowal of a new name. Yet “outside” the dreams, Aristides’ repeated attempts to renew his oratorical career, and so to return to his “old” associations and persona, show that the dreams did not accomplish their transformative goal.¹⁰⁹

The dissonance between Aristides’ conflicting aspirations continued to sound a jarring note in his life. Aristides’ story is that of a man torn between desires that he could not reconcile. I suggest that his straggle was symptomatic of a shift in cultural values, a “crisis of the subject” that would not appear as a crisis of major cultural importance until a century later.¹¹⁰ More specifically, it was a crisis of a male subject becoming increasingly unable to bear the persona whereby he was publicly constructed and so recognized as properly male. I would reintroduce at this point a thesis that I think Brown dismisses too quickly, the view that the Antonine age witnessed an excess of public life that caused emotional deprivation.¹¹¹ Certainly Aristides’ case presents a compelling portrayal of the need for intimacy and the drastic effects of its absence. The tensions created by the demand to live in the forest of eyes were inscribed on Aristides’ body as sickness—a sickness, I think, that indicated a need for a change in the way in which male identity was culturally encoded.

Despite his dreams, Aristides never surmounted the conflicting currents that pulled him toward both the public forum and the private cult. Alternately retreating to and emerging from his dreamy Asclepian world, he failed to live up to the promise of either “Aristides” or ‘Theodoras,” and his body continued to register the tensions of that conflict. Later men did surmount the conflict. They retreated first into chastity, and then to the desert, abandoning the civic codes of masculine identity that had proved to be at once too large and too small. I read Aristides’ story, finally, as an early harbinger of the ascetic movement that released men from the confines of a definition of masculinity that was psychologically cramping. The sick body of Aristides, only fitfully cured by his visions of other possibilities of selfconstruction, stands as a telling counterpoint to the body of the ascetic St. Antony; as his biographer Athanasius reported, his body was perfect.¹¹²

¹ Aelius Aristides, Sacred Tales 2.18-21 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:295-96).

² Ibid. 2.24 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:296).

³ Ibid. 2.46 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:300).

⁴ Ibid. 2.23 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:296).

⁵ Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, p. 54.

⁶ See pp. 109–17 above for a discussion of oneiric healing in the cult of Asclepius.

⁷ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:43.

⁸ Ibid., pp. 54, 57.

⁹ Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, p. 29.

¹⁰ Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:57.

¹¹ Sacred Tales 1.64 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:289).

¹² Ibid. 1.3; Or. 23.16 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:278, 29); see Stehr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, p. 46.

¹³ Sacred Tales 4.27 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:323).

¹⁴ See Behr, Complete Works, 2:438n.105.

¹⁵ Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 1–5.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 9–13.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 23–25.

¹⁸ Sacred Tales 2.60 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:303).

¹⁹ Ibid., 2.62-64 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:303-4).

²⁰ Behr, Aelius Avistides and the Sacred Tales, p. 24.

²¹ Sacred Tales 2.6 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:293).

²² Ibid., 2.7 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:293); for a discussion of Aristides’ sometime contempt for human doctors when compared with Asclepius, see Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 168–70, and Temkin, Hippocrates in a World of Payans and Christians, pp. 184–87.

²³ Sacred Tales 1.4 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:278).

²⁴ Ibid., 2.70, 3.44 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:305, 315); see Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 26, 41–60, for a discussion of this period of Aristides’ life.

²⁵ Sacred Tales 2.2-3 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:292); see Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 116–30, for a chronological account of the composition of the Sacred Tales.

²⁶ Sacred Tales 2.9 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:293).

²⁷ Oration 2: “To Plato: In Defense of Oratory” (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 1:78-150).

²⁸ Or. 2.396 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 1:141).

²⁹ Ibid. 2.396-97 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 1:141).

³⁰ Ibid. 2.398 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 1:141-42).

³¹ For the date of this oration, see Behr, Complete Works, 2:416n.l.

³² Or. 42.7 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:248); see pp. 112–13 above for other examples of renewal of the body in an Asclepian context.

³³ Or. 42.7 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:248).

³⁴ Liddell, Scott, Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. kathedra.

³⁵ Sacred Tales 5.36 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:346).

³⁶ With regard to the character of Aristides’ illness, Brown cautions against relying on a “cheap triumph of modern clinical knowingness at the expense of the dead” (The Making of Late Antiquity, p. 45).

³⁷ Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, p. 69.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ See the discussion of Galen by Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, pp. 68–74.

⁴⁰ See Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 42, 47–49; and André-Jean Festugière, Personal Religion among the Greeks, pp. 86–87.

⁴¹ Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, p. 72.

⁴² Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, p. 27.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 30–31.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 30.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 35.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 41.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 42.

⁴⁹ See, for example, Sacred Tales 4.15; 4.60; 5.49 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:320, 330, 348–49).

⁵⁰ Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, p. 43; for Aristides’ baths in rivers, see Sacred Tales 2.21, 48, 53, 78–79; 4.11; 5.49-55 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:295, 300, 301, 306, 319, 348–50).

⁵¹ Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, p. 43.

⁵² Festugière, Personal Religion among the Greeks, p. 86.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 98.

⁵⁴ Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 44.

⁵⁵ ibid., p. 42.

⁵⁶ Ibid., pp. 27–28.

⁵⁷ Sacred Tales 1.9, 13, 22, 54; 5.8 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:279, 280, 281, 287, 341).

⁵⁸ Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 44.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 45.

⁶⁰ Irenaeus, Haer. 1.4.2 (ANF 1:321).

⁶¹ Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:57.

⁶² Brown, The Body and Society, p. 18.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 27.

⁶⁴ See Sacred Tales 1.9, 15, 21, 28, 32, 40, 50, 53, 55, 59, 65; 3.24; 4.6 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 312, 319).

⁶⁵ Sacred Tales 1.17 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:280); the identity of Aristides’ friend Zeno is unknown.

⁶⁶ See Sacred Tales 4.52 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:328), where Aristides reports the following oneiric statement by Asclepius: “He said that it was fitting that my mind be changed from its present condition, and having been changed, associate with god, and by its association be superior to man’s estate, and that neither was remarkable, either by associating with god, to be superior, or being superior, to associate with god.”

⁶⁷ See Veyne, History of Private Life, pp. 241–42, on the relation between the body and the social order.

⁶⁸ Sacred Tales 1.31 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:283).

⁶⁹ Or. 42.12 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 249–50); Sacred Tales 4.38 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:325) is one of the many passages in which Aristides remembers dreams in which Asclepius commanded him to compose speeches, poetry, and hymns.

⁷⁰ Maud Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century C.E.,” pp. 389–415.

⁷¹ Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender,” p. 389; Brown, The Body and Society, p. 11.

⁷² Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender,” p. 393.

⁷³ Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, pp. 92–94.

⁷⁴ Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender,” p. 402.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 404.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ For a good discussion of Polemo’s Physiognomonica, see Elizabeth Cornelia Evans, ‘The Study of Physiognomy in the 2nd century a.d.,” pp. 96–108.

⁷⁸ Philostratus, Vitae sophistarum 536 (text and trans. in Wright, pp. 116–19).

⁷⁹ Richlin, Garden of Priapus, pp. 41, 93, 137, 168, 188–89.

⁸⁰ Philostratus, Vit. soph. 536 (text and trans. in Wright, pp. 116–17).

⁸¹ Gleason, ‘The Semiotics of Gender,” pp. 404–5.

⁸² Or. 28.114 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:131).

⁸³ Ibid. 28.103, 110 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:128, 130).

⁸⁴ Ibid. 28.11, 128–129 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:109, 133–34).

⁸⁵ Ibid. 28.21 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:111).

⁸⁶ Ibid. 28.55-56 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:118-19).

⁸⁷ Ibid. 28.25-104 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:112-29).

⁸⁸ Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 10–11; Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender,” pp. 394402; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 2:19.

⁸⁹ Or. 33.25, 27 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:170-71).

⁹⁰ Ibid. 34.47 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:181); on dancing as a sign of effeminacy, see Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, pp. 92, 98, 101.

⁹¹ Or. 34.48, 56, 61 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:181, 183, 184).

⁹² Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender,” p. 406.

⁹³ Sacred Tales 1.16, 49 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:280, 286).

⁹⁴ Ibid. 4.60-61 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:330).

⁹⁵ Ibid. 1.15 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:280).

⁹⁶ Or. 34: “Against Those Who Burlesque the Mysteries (Of Oratory)” (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:173-84; 398n.1); see also Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 45, 106–7.

⁹⁷ Ibid. 28.122 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:132).

⁹⁸ Ibid. 23.16 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:29).

⁹⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰⁰ See, for example, Sacred Tales 2.21, 28, 53, 73; 3.13; 4.1-2, 7, 38, 62; 5.3 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:296, 297, 301, 305, 310, 318, 319, 325, 330, 340, 305).

¹⁰¹ For another reference to redness as a sign of physical well-being, see Sacred Tales 2.53 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:301).

¹⁰² Ibid. 2.21 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:295-96).

¹⁰³ Or. 28.113-15 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:130-31).

¹⁰⁴ Ibid. 28.115 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:131).

¹⁰⁵ Sacred Tales 4.50 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:328); for a discussion of the appearance of the gods in dreams in the form of statues, see pp. 28–35 above.

¹⁰⁶ See H. S. Versnell, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, 1:35, 92.

¹⁰⁷ Sacred Tales 4.52 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:328).

¹⁰⁸ Ibid. 4.53-54 (trans. Behr, Complete Works, 2:329).

¹⁰⁹ For an account of Aristides’ return to his oratorical career, see Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, pp. 91–102.

¹¹⁰ For discussion of the cultural upheavals in the third century, see Brown, Making of Late Antiquity, pp. 58–80. John Gager has observed that

the case of the second-century rhetor Aelius Aristides ... is at once atypical of normal aristocratic religiosity and indicative of new currents in his day. For it was in the second century that the emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius became initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries, that Antoninus Pius legalized the enthusiastic Phrygian cult of Cybele, and that senatorial participation in non-Roman (Mithras, Dionysus) or Greco-Roman (Isis-Diana, Serapis-Jupiter) cults increased markedly. (Kingdom and Community, pp. 98–99)

In “Misery and Mystery: Aelius Aristides,” Smith has added to this view the following remarks that are pertinent to the perspective within which I understand Aristides’ selfdivision: “The second century was a time when rapid changes in world view and new social developments were inevitably being incorporated into the perceptive human viewpoint. Yet not all persons saw the changes that were taking place before their eyes. Old views were not quickly abandoned but were losing their ability to compel assent. Deep rifts were growing between inherited beliefs and perceived reality” (30). Aristides was an early witness to the “spiritual revolution” that was in the making (31). For a discussion of the phrase “crisis of the subject,” see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3:95.

¹¹¹ Brown, Making of Late Antiquity, p. 27. It should be noted that the demands on wealthy aristocratic landowners like Aristides to live public lives, particularly by holding public office, were immense. Aristides was elected against his will to the office of tax collector in Smyrna, and appointed, also against his will, as police commissioner of his district. In both cases he protested and after lengthy lawsuits was granted immunity from holding public office. See Behr Aelius Aristides, pp. 77–86. Interestingly, despite his obvious desire to excel as a public speaker, Aristides did not have a natural flair for extempore speaking. As Philostratus reports, Aristides compensated for this failing by striving for accuracy and perfection of style, and by reading past masters of rhetoric. Nonetheless, “he so greatly admired extempore eloquence that he used to shut himself up in a room and practise it in private. And he used to work it out by evolving it clause by clause and thought by thought. But this process we must regard as chewing rather than eating, for extempore eloquence is the crowning achievement of a fluent and facile tongue” (Vitae sophist arum 582–83 [text and trans. in Wright, pp. 214–19]). Philostratus’ rather withering conclusion reinforces the pathetic picture of a man who would have preferred to sit in his room and read, yet who felt compelled to compete in a public arena for which he had little taste or talent, at least of the “crowning” sort.

¹¹² Athanasius, Vita Antonii 14 (PG. 26.864C): after twenty years of ascetic practice, Anthony’s body, like his soul, was without blemish.