Worship of healing deities in ancient Ostia

Overview

Ostia was the main port of ancient Rome, situated on the left bank of Tiber River. According to the tradition, it was founded by the king Ancus Marcius in the 7^th century BC. Already in the Republican era, Ostia became a quite big town with a developed infrastructure, but the main functions and activities in the town were connected to the storing and reloading of goods (especially grain) for Rome. During archaeological excavations a lot of artefacts – both artistic (e.g. relief tombstones) and epigraphic (inscriptions – and several buildings related to the history of ancient medicine were discovered. In this paper, architectural monuments – sanctuaries of ancient healing deities – are presented.

In the north-east part of the sc. Sacred Area of the Republican Temples the remains of the sc. Tetra style Temple are located (Regio I, Insula XV, 2). It is a rectangular temple built on a podium at the end of the 2nd century BC. It was probably dedicated to Aesculapius and his daughter Hygeia, the main healing deities of the Antiquity, who were incorporated into the Roman pantheon from the Greeks in the 3rd century BC. In Ostia, two sanctuaries of Bona Dea were also discovered. Bona Dea (Good Goddess) was a Roman deity of purity, fertility and health, worshipped almost exclusively by women. One of her shrines is located in Regio V, Insula X, 2 and was built already at the beginning of the 2nd century BC. In the first half of the 1st century the second shrine of this goddess was built in Ostia, in Regio IV, Insula VIII, 3.

In Ostia a lot of complexes of baths were uncovered, which points to the important role of hygiene in the life of its inhabitants. Also, the existence of several doctors and possibly of a medical school is documented by the iconographic sources and inscriptions. All these artefacts and presented architectural remains of the sanctuaries confirm the hypothesis that the health ranked among the important values of the local population, which were decisively looked after..

KEYWORDS:
antiquity – Ostia – sanctuary – Aesculapius – Bona Dea