A Body Part in Clay, a Ship in Miniature

The variety of surviving Greek votives is itself a record of what worshippers wanted and feared. Healing sanctuaries of Asklepios have yielded thousands of terracotta anatomical votives, model eyes, legs, breasts and internal organs, left by patients as thanks for a cure or as a request the god address that specific part of the body, a practice archaeologists find echoed at sanctuaries across the Mediterranean world well beyond Greece itself. Sailors dedicated model ships or actual ship parts on safe return from a voyage; farmers dedicated model animals or tools; victorious athletes and cities dedicated statues, and after a battle, captured arms and armor were commonly stripped from the defeated and dedicated as a tropaion or hung in a sanctuary as a permanent record of the victory attributed to the god's favor.

The Athenian Acropolis alone has yielded thousands of dedicatory inscriptions and statue bases, the objects themselves long since removed or destroyed but their donors' names and reasons for giving preserved in stone. Inscriptions accompanying many dedications name the giver and sometimes the specific favor received, turning a single object into a small, permanent public record of an individual's otherwise unrecorded life and its moment of crisis or relief.