Bowl of Hygieia

The picture is older than Hygieia. Gina Salapata, a classical archaeologist at Massey University, traces a snake drinking from a vessel back to the Bronze Age, in the second millennium BCE, in religious and funerary settings in Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, Cyprus and the Levant. By the eighth and seventh centuries BCE Greeks put it only on funerary jugs and cups. In the fifth century BCE Spartan artists were the first to set the drinking snake among human figures, on reliefs of seated heroes offering a snake a drink from a wine cup. In the fourth century BCE, southern Italian vase painters showed the Hesperides feeding their dragon Ladon from a bowl, and the witch Medea offering a bowl of drugs to the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece.

The Greek word pharmakon meant a substance that could heal or harm, and Salapata thinks that double meaning is probably why the motif passed to the healing gods, and above all to Hygieia. She points to a relief of the late fifth century BCE, now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, in which Hygieia sits beside her father nourishing a snake. A votive relief in the Acropolis Museum shows her standing beside Asklepios with her hand on his shoulder while he leans on his snake-entwined staff. The Science Museum Group gives her two sisters, Panacea (“Cure-All”) and Iaso (“Remedy”), and Pausanias found all three sharing a portion of an altar at Oropus with Athena Healer. Her main temples, the Science Museum Group says, were at Epidaurus, Corinth, Cos and Pergamon; the Romans called her Salus.