Oltre le Muse. Lo spazio nella retorica rinnovata di Elio Aristide

As is typical of many rhetoricians involved in public activities, Aelius Aristide (2nd century CE) dedicates several passages of his works to the description and above all the celebration of ‘places’, from the smaller ones like temples, to the larger ones like cities or territories. In several passages, however, the description of places acts in a more symbolic way, i.e. as the spatial contextualization of Aristides’ personal relationship with the healer god of whom he is a fervent devotee, Asclepius, and who is also the inspirer of his eloquence. Aristides thus aims to find new places for his new ‘Asclepian’ rhetoric, or to give new meaning to more ‘traditional’ rhetorical contexts. In the Sacred Tales (orr. 47–52) he describes the sanctuaries of Asclepius as the ideal place for performing declamations. In one passage (or. 50, 14–18), the asklepieion of Pergamon functions as the locus amoenus where a new poetical (read: rhetorical) investiture propitiated by Asclepius takes place, in a way which is reminiscent of Plato’s Phaedrus. The relationship with the Platonism of his times – a major theme in Aristides – is probably the key to understanding a quite allegorical passage (or. 39, 6), where the plane tree collocated in the sanctuary of Pergamon is described.