The statuette (ΜΘ 7502) of 44 cm high (along with the plinth) is made of Pentelic marble and was found in 1978 on a plot in the center of Thessaloniki.

The goddess wears chiton and himation and stands on an inherent rectangular plinth, with the right foot fixed and the left slightly bent. The head is missing but it would have been turned to its right, as deduced from the preserved part of the neck. In her left hand she holds an object, possibly a pyxis (a kind of box). Only the arm is preserved from the right hand. In its palm she would have hold a phiale from which the goddess would feed the snake -symbol of her father, the god Asclepius, and hers.  The snake’s body covers the left breast of the figure diagonally to the back, at the height of the left shoulder. The statuette dates back to the 2nd c. AD and it is a copy of the Hellenistic type of the Hope Hygieia.

Hygieia was worshipped in conjunction with her father, the god Asclepius, whose worship had an important place in the life of ancient Thessaloniki, as indicated by the fact that one of the city’s four tribes witnessed in the epigraphs was named Asclepias.