# Transcript

Hello, I’m Alex Wilding from The Open University. In this recording, I’m going to be talking about this marble relief from the Amphiaraos which dates to the fourth century BCE. You may remember from earlier on in your studies, that the term relief denotes a type of artwork, such as a sculpture which has raised moulded shapes and images against a flat background.

As you can see, there’s a lot of imagery going on in this relief, which I’m going to take you through over the course of this recording. In particular, I want to give you a sense of how we might interpret iconography, that is the way in which drawings and figures have been used to represent ideas to think a bit more about personal religious experience. As a starting point, we know that this relief was set up as a dedication, because of an inscribed text at the bottom. The inscription reads Archinos, that is the name of the person making the dedication, set this up, meaning the relief, to Amphiaraos. It is with this information that we may look at the imagery of the relief for clues about the religious experiences of Archinos and reasons why he might have made this dedication.

There are four male figures depicted in the relief. Looking closely at their facial features and their hairstyles, we see that three of them are the same person. These three figures are best identified as Archinos himself. The fact that Archinos appears in the relief three times means that we should see each of his representations as belonging to a different scene if you like, each of which seeks to explain an aspect of Archinos’ personal religious experience.

If we begin with the middle scene, we find Archinos lying down on a bed. As Archinos sleeps, a snake appears to bite or lick his right shoulder. In the ancient world, snakes were commonly associated with healing deities and so the snake here is in fact healing Archinos’ sore shoulder.

Indeed, one fragment of a lost play called Amphiaraos, produced in the late fifth century BCE by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes, refers to the use of snakes in medical healing at the Amphiareion. It is therefore likely that this scene shows Archinos undergoing the process of incubation, whereby he would have slept overnight at the sanctuary to receive a cure.

This interpretation goes some way to helping us understand the broader context of the dedication. It was set up to commemorate Archinos’ religious healing after he had slept at the Amphiareion. This reading of the central scene is confirmed when we look at the scene on the left.

We still find Archinos now in a standing position with an injured right shoulder. However, this time he raises it towards another male figure on the left, who offers him treatment. This other figure has to be a god because of his overly large size and stature, and he is almost certainly Amphiaraos given the relief’s location within his sanctuary.

Taking the two scenes together, they appear to offer very different perspectives about Archinos’ medical treatment. They may well represent different ideas Archinos held about his own religious experience and interaction with the god. Indeed, at the very top of the relief, almost looking down on these scenes, are a pair of eyes.

These eyes likely represent ideas of a vision or a dream, and hence symbolise a version of events Archinos might’ve encountered or thought he encountered when he slept at the Amphiareion. Finally, in the third and final scene on the right, Archinos is once again shown.

This time he is looking and gesturing his right hand towards an object in the background. This object is a pinax or a board which is supported by a tall tenon. Different interpretations of the subject have been put forward. One is that Archinos is gesturing toward our relief here. In other words, the dedication he set up for Amphiaraos after being cured.

A second theory is that the pinax represents the wooden board mentioned in the sanctuary’s sacred regulation, which you met in Activity 6. You may remember that it was the job of the temple keeper to write up all the names of those who had come to be cured by the god for all to see.

Whatever its precise identification, this third scene may be interpreted as the final stage of Archinos’ religious experience, by representing him as a thankful worshipper who had successfully been cured at the Amphiareion.