Indigenizarea „celuilalt”- cazul romanizării lui Asclepios la Ovidiu
Indigenizing the "Other"- The Case of Romanized Asclepios

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the embodiment of the god of medicine, Asclepios, and the creation of a new „locus memoriae", in Ovid's „Metamorphoses" (15. 626-690), after the pilgrimage of the Romans to Epidauros. While in regular cases of "incubatio", a sick individual suffers somatic transformation in his/her sleep, here, the god himself undergoes bodily modification. His metamorphosis implies a conscious cultural switch: he abandons the consecrated shape of Hellenic anthropomorphism for a teriomorphic appearance, before de-materilaizing at the mouths of Tiber (744-745). Asclepios’ metamorphosis is emblematic for the imperial politics of the Roman expansionism: Roman pilgrims appropriate the cultures they touch instead of suffering from passive indigenization, or morphing into cultural „others".

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