The Myth of Asclepius

At a Glance

• Central figures: Asclepius, son of Apollo and the mortal woman Coronis, raised by the centaur Chiron to become the greatest physician in the world; Zeus, king of the gods, who strikes him down; and Hades, whose underworld is drained by Asclepius’s resurrections.
• Setting: Ancient Greece - Olympus, the underworld, and the sanctuaries called Asclepieia where pilgrims came to be healed.
• The turn: Asclepius masters the ability to bring the dead back to life, drawing the wrath of Hades and then Zeus, who will not allow a mortal to hold authority over death.
• The outcome: Zeus kills Asclepius with a thunderbolt; afterward, Asclepius is deified and placed among the stars as the constellation Ophiuchus.
• The legacy: The staff of Asclepius - a single serpent coiled around a rod - became the symbol of medicine and healing, and remains so today.

Apollo had a lover named Coronis, a mortal woman, and she was unfaithful to him. When Apollo learned of it - some say through his own gift of prophecy, some say through a crow that brought him the news - his rage was immediate and without mercy. He had Coronis killed, or in some versions sent his sister Artemis to do it, the silver arrows flying before any argument could be made. Only when she was already dying did Apollo learn she was pregnant with his child.

He took the infant from her body before the pyre consumed her. He named the boy Asclepius and carried him to Chiron, the great centaur on Mount Pelion, who knew more of medicine than any living creature and who had already raised Achilles. Under that ancient tutor, Asclepius became something more than a physician. He became the art itself.

The Centaur’s Teaching

Chiron taught him everything he knew - the herbs that draw out fever, the poultices for wounds that will not close, the knife-work that relieves pressure in the skull. But Asclepius went further than his teacher. Where Chiron had knowledge, Asclepius had a gift that seemed to operate below the level of learning, a sure instinct for the body’s hidden machinery. He studied the properties of plants, the behavior of wounds, the particular stench of different infections. He understood which ailments were mechanical and which were something else entirely, resident in the spirit rather than the flesh. No mortal healed as he did. Few gods could claim better.

The Asclepieia went up across Greece - sanctuaries where the sick came to sleep on consecrated ground and wait for the god to visit them in dreams. They left offerings: small terracotta models of the limb or organ that had been healed, bronze tablets inscribed with the name of the ailment and the cure. The serpent was everywhere in those temples, because the serpent sheds its skin and does not die from it, and Asclepius had adopted the creature as his own. His staff - a plain rod with a single serpent wound around it - became the thing people thought of when they thought of him.

The Dead Brought Back

His healing went past what any mortal or god had considered the boundary. Asclepius brought the dead back to life. The sources name Hippolytus among them - Theseus’s son, killed by his own horses after his father’s curse - and Glaucus, and others. The mechanism he used was divine, a gift possibly from Athena, who had given him blood from the veins of the Gorgon: the blood from the right side of Medusa’s body that healed, and the blood from the left that killed. With this, Asclepius could do what gods did not typically allow a mortal to do.

Hades noticed immediately. Souls that were owed to the underworld were being returned to bodies above ground. The realm of the dead was growing lighter. Hades brought his complaint to Zeus and did not disguise his anger: this mortal physician was undermining the whole structure that separated the living from the dead, the architecture that kept the world ordered. If the dead could be recalled whenever a sufficiently skilled healer felt moved to recall them, then death meant nothing, and if death meant nothing, the dominion of the gods over mortal life meant nothing either.

The Thunderbolt

Zeus agreed. The issue was not cruelty toward Asclepius - the accounts do not suggest Zeus bore him any particular malice - but the problem of precedent. A mortal who could raise the dead was something the cosmos had not been built to accommodate. If Asclepius’s power spread or was inherited or taught, the distinction between mortality and immortality would dissolve. Hades’s kingdom would empty. The wheel of fate, which the Moirai spun and cut, would be undermined by a man with herbs and divine blood.

Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt. The same weapon he had used against titans and giants he turned on a healer, and Asclepius died without the long warning of a condemned man, without the theater of a trial. He was there and then he was not.

Apollo grieved in his way - which is to say, with violence. Unable to strike at Zeus himself, he killed the Cyclopes who had forged the thunderbolts, and Zeus retaliated by forcing Apollo to serve a mortal master for a year, tending the flocks of King Admetus of Pherae. The chain of consequence ran a long way from a single death.

Ophiuchus

After death came deification, as it sometimes did for those who had been too large for mortality to hold permanently. Asclepius was placed among the stars as Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer - the great figure in the sky holding a serpent coiled across his hands - and accepted into the company of divine things. His children carried the work forward. Hygieia, whose name gave medicine the word hygiene, presided over prevention and cleanliness. Panacea - whose name means the cure for everything - oversaw remedies. Iaso managed recovery from illness. His sons Machaon and Podalirius were surgeons in the Trojan War, working among the wounded at the ships.

The temples kept operating after his death, perhaps more than before. Epidaurus was the most famous - a sanctuary and a theater and a healing center together, where the ill slept in the abaton, the sacred dormitory, and waited for Asclepius to come to them in the dark and prescribe a cure. They came for centuries. They left their offerings and their inscriptions. They brought their children and their parents and themselves.

The staff with its serpent outlasted everything else. It is still the emblem of medicine. Not the caduceus of Hermes, which carries two serpents and belongs to commerce and travel and the escorting of the dead - that confusion is a modern error. The rod of Asclepius has one serpent, belongs to healing alone, and comes from a man who was killed for healing too well.