Aelius Aristides
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Aelius Aristides (AD 117 - 181) was a popular Greek orator who lived during the Roman Empire. He is considered to be a prime example of the Second Sophistic, a group of showpiece orators who flourished from the reign of Nero until c. 230 AD.
The son of a wealthy land-owner, Aristides studied under Alexander of Cotiaeon, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius. A career as an orator ended at the age of 26 when he was afflicted during a visit to Rome with the first of a long series of illnesses, possibly of a psychosomatic origin. His health problem drove him to the sanctuary of Pergamon (in present-day Turkey) where Asclepius, the god of healing, would often advise people certain remedies in their dreams. The cures he sent Aristides seem ridiculous today, but it has to be remembered that there was very little real knowledge about the workings of the human body, and how diseases could be solved, or what caused them. Apart from his orations, he also wrote a very different account called the Sacred Tales, in which he describes mostly how Asclepius, the god of healing, cured him from various diseases inflicted on him by fate. Other gods to assist him were Telesphorus, Athena and Serapis. He composed hymns to several deities as well as an oration on Zeus, therefore it would be wrong to see him as monotheistic.
He lived in Smyrna where between bouts of illnesses he wrote and gave lectures. Based on the Sacred Tales he wrote, historians and psychologists today consider him to be rather vainglorious and egocentric. Some even judge he had severe psychological problems, but there is no contemporary evidence to witness this.
When he resumed his normal life he successfully resisted, as he thought with Asclepius' help, having to take public offices which was required from citizens. He met Marcus Aurelius when that emperor visited Asia Minor. He wrote him a letter begging for assistance, after Smyrna had been devastated by an earthquake. According to Philostratus Marcus Aurelius shed tears over the pages when he read the words: 'she is a desert through which the west winds blow'. A statue of Aristides stands in the Vatican Museum in Rome.
According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the remainder of his surviving writings, although praised by his contemporaries, is of primary interest for the incidental light they cast on the social history of Asia Minor in the 2nd century AD. His Sacred Tales may also be of interest for researchers of ancient medicine or ancient religion. A complete English translation was published by C.A. Behr in 1986.
