Aelius Aristides

Aelius Aristides
Statue of Aelius Aristides in The Vatican
Born	117 CE Mysia
Died	181 CE
Language	Ancient Greek
Genre	Oratory
Subject	Dream interpretation
Notable works	Sacred Tales

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus (Greek: Αἴλιος Ἀριστείδης; 117–181 CE) was a Greek orator and author considered to be a prime example of the Second Sophistic, a group of celebrated and highly influential orators who flourished from the reign of Nero until c. 230 CE. More than fifty of his orations and other works survive, dating from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. His early success was interrupted by a decades-long series of illnesses for which he sought relief by divine communion with the god Asclepius, effected by interpreting and obeying the dreams that came to him while sleeping in the god’s sacred precinct; he later recorded this experience in a series of discourses titled Sacred Tales (Hieroi Logoi). In later life he resumed his career as an orator, achieving such notable success that Philostratus would declare that “Aristides was of all the sophists most deeply versed in his art.”

Aristides was born at Hadriani in northern Mysia. His father, a wealthy landowner, arranged for Aristides to have the finest education available. Aristides first studied under Alexander of Cotiaeum (later a tutor of Marcus Aurelius) at Smyrna, then traveled to various cities to learn from the foremost sophists of the day, including a stay in Athens to hear Herodes Atticus.

The capstone of his education was a trip to Egypt in 141 CE. Along the way he began his career as an orator, declaiming at Cos, Cnidis, Rhodes, and Alexandria. His travels in Egypt included a journey upriver in hopes of finding the source of the Nile, as he later recounted in "The Egyptian Discourse." Becoming ill, he returned home to Smyrna, and sought to cure himself by turning to the Egyptian god Serapis (as recounted in his earliest preserved speech, "Regarding Serapis").

Hoping to advance his career as an orator, late in 143 CE Aristides traveled to Rome, but his ambitions were thwarted by severe illness. He returned home to Smyrna. Seeking relief, he eventually turned to Asclepius, “the paramount healing god of the ancient world,” and traveled to the god’s temple in Pergamum, “one of the chief healing sites in the ancient world,” where “incubants” slept on the temple grounds, then recorded their dreams in search of prescriptions from the god; for Aristides, these included fasting, unusual diets, bloodletting, enemas, vomiting, and refraining from bathing or bathing in frigid rivers.