The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (40 page)

1
. This myth is of familiar pattern (see
43.
c
:
68.
d
; 105.
a
, etc.), except that Hippothous is twice exposed and that, on the first occasion, the shepherds come to blows. The anomaly is perhaps due to a misreading of an icon-sequence, which showed royal twins being found by shpeherds, and these same twins coming to blows when grown to manhood – like Pelias and Neleus (see
68.
f
), Proetus and Acrisius (see
73.
a
) or Eteocles and Polyneices (see 106.
b
).

2
. Alope is the Moon-goddess as vixen who gave her name to the Thessalian city of Alope (Pherecydes, quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium
sub
Alope); the vixen was also the emblem of Messenia (see
89.
8
and 146.
6
). The mythographer is probably mistaken in recording that the robe worn by Hippothous was cut from Alope’s dress; it will have been the swaddling band into which his clan and family marks were woven (see
10.
1
and
60.
2
).

50

ASCLEPIUS

C
ORONIS
, daughter of Phlegyas, King of the Lapiths, Ixion’s brother, lived on the shores of the Thessalian Lake Beobeis, in which she used to wash her feet.
¹

b
. Apollo became her lover, and left a crow with snow-white feathers to guard her while he went to Delphi on business. But Coronis had long nursed a secret passion for Ischys, the Arcadian son of Elatus, and now admitted him to her couch, though already with child by Apollo. Even before the excited crow had set out for Delphi, to report the scandal and be praised for its vigilance, Apollo had divined Coronis’s infidelity, and therefore cursed the crow for not having pecked out Ischys’s eyes when he approached Coronis. The crow was turned black by this curse, and all its descendants have been black ever since.
²

c
. When Apollo complained to his sister Artemis of the insult done him, she avenged it by shooting a quiverful of arrows at Coronis. Afterwards, gazing at her corpse, Apollo was filled with sudden remorse, but could not now restore her to life. Her spirit had descended to Tartarus, her corpse had been laid on the funeral pyre, the last perfumes poured over it, and the fire already alight, before Apollo recovered his presence of mind; then he motioned to Hermes, who by the light of the flames cut the still living child from Coronis’s womb.
³
It was a boy, whom Apollo named Asclepius, and carried off to the cave of Cheiron the Centaur, where he learned the arts of medicine and the chase. As for Ischys, also called Chylus: some say that he was killed by Zeus with a thunderbolt, others that Apollo himself shot him down.
⁴

d
. The Epidaurians, however, tell a very different story. They say that Coronis’s father, Phlegyas, who founded the city of that name where he gathered together all the best warriors of Greece, and lived by raiding, came to Epidaurus to spy out the land and the strength of the people; and that his daughter Coronis who, unknown to him, was with child by Apollo, came too. In Apollo’s shrine at Epidaurus, with the assistance of Artemis and the Fates, Coronis gave birth to a boy, whom she at once exposed on Mount Titthion, now famous for the medicinal virtues of its plants. There, Aresthanas, a goatherd, noticing that his bitch and one of his she-goats were no longer with him, went in search of them, and found them taking turns to suckle a child. He was about to lift the child up, when a bright light all about it deterred him. Loth to meddle with a divine mystery, he piously turned away, thus leaving Asclepius to the protection of his father Apollo.
⁵

e
. Asclepius, say the Epidaurians, learned the art of healing both from Apollo and from Cheiron. He became so skilled in surgery and the use of drugs that he is revered as the founder of medicine. Not only did he heal the sick, but Athene had given him two phials of the Gorgon
Medusa’s blood; with what had been drawn from the veins of her left side, he could raise the dead; with what had been drawn from her right side, he could destroy instantly. Others say that Athene and Asclepius divided the blood between them: he used it to save life, but she to destroy life and instigate wars. Athene had previously given two drops of this same blood to Erichthonius, one to kill, the other to cure, and fastened the phials to his serpent body with golden bands.
⁶

f
. Among those whom Asclepius raised from the dead were Lycurgus, Capaneus, and Tyndareus. It is not known on which occasion Hades complained to Zeus that his subjects were being stolen from him – whether it was after the resurrection of Tyndareus, or of Glaucus, or of Hippolytus, or of Orion; it is certain only that Asclepius was accused of having been bribed with gold, and that both he and his patient were killed by Zeus’s thunderbolt.
⁷

g
. However, Zeus later restored Asclepius to life; and so fulfilled an indiscreet prophecy made by Cheiron’s daughter Euippe, who had declared that Asclepius would become a god, die, and resume godhead – thus twice renewing his destiny. Asclepius’s image, holding a curative serpent, was set among the stars by Zeus.
⁸

h
. The Messenians claim that Asclepius was a native of Tricca in Messene; the Arcadians, that he was born at Thelpusa; and the Thessalians, that he was a native of Tricca in Thessaly. The Spartans call him. Agnitas, because they have carved his image from a willow-trunk; and the people of Sicyon honour him in the form of a serpent mounted on a mule-cart. At Sicyon the left hand of his image holds the cone of a pistachio-pine; but at Epidaurus it rests on a serpent’s head; in both cases the right hand holds a sceptre.
⁹

i
. Asclepius was the father of Podaleirius and Machaon, the physicians who attended the Greeks during the siege of Troy; and of the radiant Hygieia. The Latins call him Aesculapius, and the Cretans say that he, not Polyeidus, restored Glaucus, son of Minos, to life; using a certain herb, shown him by a serpent in a tomb.
¹⁰

1
. Strabo: ix. 5. 21 and xiv. 1. 40.

2
. Pausanias: ii. 26. 5; Pindar:
Pythian Odes
iii. 25 ff.; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3.

3
. Pindar:
Pythian Odes
iii. 8 ff.; Pausanias:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
Fabula
202; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
ii. 612 ff.

4
. Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3; Hyginus:
loc. cit
. and
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 40.

5
. Pausanias: ix. 36. 1 and ii. 26. 4;
Inscriptiones Graecae
iv. 1. 28.

6
. Diodorus Siculus: v. 74. 6; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3; Tatian:
Address to the Greeks
; Euripides:
Ion
999 ff.

7
. Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3–4; Lucian:
On the Dance
45; Hyginus:
Fabula
49; Eratosthenes, quoted by Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 14; Pindar:
Pythian Odes
iii. 55 ff., with scholiast.

8
. Germanicus Caesar:
On Aratus’s Phenomena
77 ff.; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
642 ff.; Hyginus:
loc. cit
.

9
. Pausanias: ii. 26. 6; viii. 25. 6; iii. 14. 7 and ii. 10. 3; Strabo: xiv. 1.39.

10
. Homer:
Iliad
ii. 732; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 14.

1
. This myth concerns ecclesiastical politics in Northern Greece, Attica, and the Peloponnese: the suppression, in Apollo’s name, of a pre-Hellenic medical cult, presided over by Moon-priestesses at the oracular shrines of local heroes reincarnate as serpents, or crows, or ravens. Among their names were Phoroneus, identifiable with the Celtic Raven-god Bran, or Vron (see
57.
1
); Erichthonius the serpent-tailed (see
25.
2
); and Cronus (see
7.
1
), which is a form of Coronus (‘crow’ or ‘raven’), the name of two other Lapith kings (see
78.
a
). ‘Asclepius’ (‘unceasingly gentle’) will have been a complimentary title given to all physician heroes, in the hope of winning their benevolence.

2
. The goddess Athene, patroness of this cult, was not originally regarded as a maiden; the dead hero having been both her son and her lover. She received the title ‘Coronis’ because of the oracular crow, or raven, and ‘Hygieia’ because of the cures she brought about. Her all-heal was the mistletoe,
ixias
, a word with which the name Ischys (‘strength’) and Ixion (‘strong native’) are closely connected (see
63.
1
). The Eastern-European mistletoe, or loranthus, is a parasite of the oak and not, like the Western variety, of the poplar or the apple-tree; and ‘Aesculapius’, the Latin form of Asclepius – apparently meaning ‘that which hangs from the esculent oak’, i.e. the mistletoe – may well be the earlier title of the two. Mistletoe was regarded as the oak-tree’s genitals, and when the Druids ritually lopped it with a golden sickle, they were performing a symbolic emasculation (see
7.
1
). The viscous juice of its berries passed for oak-sperm, a liquid of great regenerative virtue. Sir James Frazer has pointed out in his
Golden Bough
that Aeneas visited the Underworld with mistletoe in his hand, and thus held the power of returning at will to the upper air. The ‘certain herb’, which raised Glaucus from the tomb, is likely to have been the mistletoe also. Ischys, Asclepius, Ixion and Polyeidus are, in fact, the same mythic character: personifications of the curative power resident in the dismembered genitals of the sacrificed oak-hero. ‘Chylus’, Ischys’s other name, means ‘the juice of a plant, or berry’.

3
. Athene’s dispensation of Gorgon-blood to Asclepius and Erichthonius suggests that the curative rites used in this cult were a secret guarded by priestesses, which it was death to investigate – the Gorgon-head is a formal warning to pryers (see
73.
5
). But the blood of the sacrificed oak-king, or of his child surrogate, is likely to have been dispensed on these occasions, as well as mistletoe-juice.

4
. Apollo’s mythographers have made his sister Artemis responsible for Ischys’s murder; and, indeed, she was originally the same goddess as Athene, in whose honour the oak-king met his death. They have also made Zeus destroy both Ischys and Asclepius with thunderbolts; and, indeed, all oak-kings fell beneath the double-axe, later formalized as a thunderbolt, and their bodies were usually roasted in a bonfire.