Chasing Asklepios: A Multivalent Network Analysis of the Migration of Healing Cult in the Saronic Gulf (575-404 BCE)

Abstract

This paper proposes a three-tier, multivalent network approach to clarify the dynamics
which governed the transmission of the healing cult of Asklepios across the Saronic
Gulf region from the Archaic to the late Classical period. As a complex and variegated
islandscape, subject to many changes in communicative and exchange links between
coastal and island communities over time, differing network analytical techniques will
be applied in succession to represent the geospatial conditions, dynamics of economic
exchange, and major shifts in socio-political relations over an extended diachronic
frame of approximately 170 years. The intention is to draw into relief how these
factors may have constrained or facilitated the spread of the Asklepios cult from its
origins in the Peloponnese during the early 6th century BCE and into Attica during the
last decades of the 5th century and onward.

Keywords: Asklepios, Saronic Gulf, Network analytical techniques, Archaic and Classical Period