After telling of the death of Numa, King of Rome, Ovid continues his potted legendary history of Rome with a short series of strange events claimed to have occurred during its early period.

First, an Etruscan was ploughing his fields when one of the clods of earth was transformed into a prophet named Tages. Ovid then mentions the spear of Romulus being transformed into a tree on the top of the Palatine Hill. He moves on to the great early Roman general Cipus, who one day discovered he had grown horns on his head. He was invited to become King of Rome, but used a ploy to have himself banned from even entering the city. The Senate then gave him a plot of land outside the walls, commemorating his actions in a carving on the city’s nearby gate.

The major event during this period was the plague that struck Rome in 293 BCE, for which the god Aesculapius (Asclepius) was brought to the city.

When the oracle at Delphi was consulted, the Romans were told to seek the aid of the son of Apollo. Therefore the Roman Senate despatched a party to the port of Epidaurus in quest of Aesculapius, a son of Apollo. The envoy leading that mission had a dream one night, in which he saw Aesculapius beside his bed, holding a staff around which a snake was entwined. The god told the envoy that he would transform himself into a larger snake for the Romans to take back with them.

Sebastiano Ricci’s The Dream of Aesculapius (c 1718) shows the god clutching his staff with snake in his right hand, appearing in the Roman envoy’s dream at Epidaurus.

The following morning, the Romans gathered at the temple, where they saw a large golden snake, which the priest told them was the god Aesculapius. The snake promptly slithered down to the port where the Roman ships were berthed and boarded one of them, so the Roman party set sail to take it to Rome.

Ovid provides a long illustrated list of the places that they sailed past on their return journey, including a stop at Antium during bad weather. The ships finally sailed up the River Tiber to the city of Rome, where they were greeted by great crowds. The snake chose the island in the River Tiber for its home, and so ended the deadly epidemic that had killed many Romans.

Although Jules-Élie Delaunay’s The Plague of Rome (1869) is based on the account in Jacques de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, that in turn refers to Ovid’s story. A pair of good and bad angels appeared: the good angel then gave commands for people to die of the plague, and the bad angel carried those commands out. At the upper right edge of the canvas, an anachronistic white statue shows Aesculapius, who was to be the city’s salvation.

A drawing attributed to Jacques-Charles Bordier du Bignon, Aesculapius Routing Death (1822), also appears to have its roots in Rome’s plight. Aesculapius has two staffs with which he is despatching the grim reaper of death. The woman to the right of Aesculapius is thought to be the goddess Ceres, as she is pouring out her breast milk to feed the starving, a detail omitted from Ovid’s account.

There are also general representations of the god with his trademark serpentine staff, including Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s drawing of Aesculapius Holding a Staff Encircled by a Snake, completed before the artist’s death in 1785.

Johannes Zacharias Simon Prey painted this group of Aesculapius, Apollo and Hippocrates in 1791. Aesculapius, holding his distinctive rod, is shown in the centre of the trio, with Hippocrates, the rather less legendary ‘father of medicine’, to the right, clutching the basal half of a human skull, and Apollo, Aesculapius’ father, behind. Hippocrates’ mantle is trimmed with the Greek letters ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ (gnothi seauton), “know thyself”, a maxim from the temple of Apollo at Delphi. They have entered a contemporary pharmacy, where an assistant uses a large mortar and pestle, and another works the bellows of a furnace. There are decorative and mischievous putti at play in the foreground.

Few traces remain of the temple of Aesculapius on Tiber Island, but Giovanni Battista Piranesi was able to find masonry that had formed a great stone ship complete with its decorated prow.

He shows this prow (above) in etchings made in 1756, and below in more detail. Carved into the rock is the unmistakable form of the serpent wound around Aesculapius’ rod, marking the site of the temple.