Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

All might have gone well had Asclepius kept tightly sealed the jar that Athena presented to him. Tightly sealed. Whether it was the glory of being celebrated as a kind of saint and saviour or whether it was a genuine desire to beat death with his arts we cannot know, but Asclepius used the Gorgon’s blood once to revive the corpse of a dead patient, then a second time, and soon he was using it as liberally and regularly as castor oil.

Hades began to grumble and fume. Unable to bear it any longer he went so far as to leave the underworld and stand angrily before the throne of his brother Zeus.

‘This man is denying me souls. He pulls them back from Thanatos just as they are ready to cross over to us. Something must be done.’

‘I agree,’ said Hera. ‘He is subverting the proper order of things. If a person is marked down for death it is quite unacceptable for a mortal to interfere. Your daughter did a very foolish thing in giving him Gorgon’s blood.’

Zeus frowned. There was no denying the truth of what they said. He was disappointed in Athena. She had not betrayed him in so flagrant and unforgivable a manner as Prometheus, but there were points of similarity that troubled him. Mortals were mortal and that was that. Allowing them access to potions that gave them ascendancy over death was quite wrong.

The thunderbolt which struck Asclepius was wholly unexpected, as bolts from the blue always are. It killed him stone dead. All of Greece lamented the loss of their beloved and valued physician and healer, but Apollo did more than mourn the passing of his son. He raged. As soon as he heard the news he took himself off to the workshop of Hephaestus and with three swift arrows shot dead Brontes, Steropes and Arges, the Cyclopes whose eternal task and pleasure it was to manufacture the Sky Father’s thunderbolts.

Such astounding rebelliousness was not to be brooked. Zeus was intolerant of any threat to his authority and always moved swiftly to put down the slightest hint of insurrection. Apollo was thrown from Olympus and commanded to serve the Thessalian king ADMETUS in a lowly position for a year and a day. Admetus had earned the approval of Zeus by his exceptionally warm hospitality and kindness to strangers – always a direct route to Zeus’s heart.

Apollo had been punished when young, you will recall, for slaying the serpent Python. His beauty, splendour and golden charm hid a stubborn will and a hot temper. He submitted to this punishment readily enough, however. Admetus was impossible to dislike and, serving as his cowherd, Apollo ensured that every cow under his care gave birth to twins.fn4 Cattle and twins were special to him.

Asclepius, meanwhile, was raised to the heavens as the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer.

Later traditions asserted that Zeus restored Asclepius to life and raised him up as a god. It is true that throughout the Mediterranean world he and his wife and daughters were worshipped as divine. Temples to him, known as asclepia, sprang up everywhere, bearing great similarities to modern spas and health clubs. Their officiating priests wore white and bathed, massaged and pampered the paying supplicants with preposterous oils, creams and patent mixtures, just as they do today. Ever sacred to Asclepius, snakes (the non-venomous kind) were encouraged to slither about the treatment rooms and clinics, a sight perhaps less common in our contemporary temples to health. The spirit and mind were as attended to then as they are now. ‘Holistic’ is, after all, a Greek-derived word. Dreams were told to priests on the morning after an overnight stay (known as an ‘incubation’) and Asclepius himself often manifested to patients. Especially, I believe, to those who paid the most.

The Asclepion of Epidaurus was as big a draw as the town’s celebrated theatre is today. Those who visit it can still see records of the illnesses, treatments, diets and cures of the patients who flocked there.

Crime and Punishment

The regular appearance, interference and intercourse of the gods with human society, which would be so remarkable, thrilling and troubling to us if it happened today, was sometimes taken for granted by the more foolish and self-important mortals of the Silver Age. Some kings were so puffed up that they ignored the most elementary precepts of the gods and exhibited the most flagrant disrespect towards them. Such blasphemous acts of lese-majesty seldom went unpunished. Like parents admonishing children with gruesome moral fables, or like Dante or Hieronymus Bosch with their cautionary hellscapes, the ancient Greeks seemed to relish the details and delightful aptness of the often elaborate and excruciating tortures that Olympus and Hades reserved for those men and women whose transgressions most aggravated them.

Ixion