Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (33 page)

After Heracles falls in love with another princess, Deianira follows the centaur’s advice. But when Heracles puts on the robe, now poisoned with the centaur’s tainted blood, it burns him so terribly that he begs to be placed on a funeral pyre. Heracles then leaps into the flames. His grief-stricken wife also kills herself by jumping into the funeral pyre when she realizes what she has done.

Ascending to the home of the gods, Heracles resolves his differences with Hera, marries Hera’s daughter Hebe (“Youth”), and enjoys immortality among the gods on Olympus.

Which great hero gets “fleeced”?

Heracles plays a bit part in a tale of family feuding and power-grabbing that takes to the high seas in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, one of the first nautical adventures in Western literature. This much-loved tale has parts recounted by Homer, the playwrights Aeschylus and Euripides (whose
Medea
covers Jason’s later years), as well as the philosopher Socrates. But the most familiar version was compiled in
Argonautica
by Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century BCE account of the legend of the young prince Jason, who is forced to flee his home in the city of Iolcus after the throne there is unlawfully seized by his uncle. Fearing for Jason’s life, his mother tucks him away in the cave of the wise centaur Chiron, who has tutored some of the greatest heroes in Greek myth.

When Jason returns to his home sometime later, his wicked uncle Pelias is in power and poised to kill his young rival. But there is one small problem—it’s a feast day, and the ancient laws of hospitality are in force. Ever resourceful, Pelias tries another tactic. He tells Jason he will step down if the young man can bring back the Golden Fleece, which hangs from a tree in Colchis and is guarded by a dragon that never sleeps.

The fearless Jason recruits a crew of fifty heroes—including Heracles—who become known as the Argonauts, after their ship, the
Argo
(“Swift”). The largest vessel ever made, it is outfitted with a magical talking beam cut from Zeus’s sacred oak at Dodona and given to Jason by Athena. Sailing from Iolcus in Thessaly, the Argonauts reach Colchis, but only after surviving a series of dangerous adventures, including a battle with the Harpies, winged monsters with hooked beaks and claws that swoop down and take the food from the table of a king. The grateful king tells the Argonauts how to defeat the next danger, the “clashing rocks” that smash together to crush any ship entering the Black Sea. Sending a dove ahead of them as a decoy, the wily Argonauts pass safely through the deadly rocks by rowing hard as the dove flies through.

Before winning the Golden Fleece, Jason discovers that he has two more obstacles—he must yoke together a pair of fire-breathing oxen and plow a large field where armed warriors spring up out of the dragon’s teeth that have been sown there. The attractive Jason and his plight draw the attention of the king’s daughter, Medea, a sorceress who gives the Argonauts’ leader magic ointments to spread on his sword, shield, and body, which will protect him from the monstrous dragon guarding the fleece. When Jason’s mission has been accomplished, Medea sails home with him on the
Argo
. The fiendish Medea then does what few ordinary sisters will do—she cuts up her brother Aspyrtus into little pieces and scatters these in the water so that her father, who is in hot pursuit, must stop to recover his son’s body for proper burial.

But it was not to be happily ever after for these lovers.

When Jason unexpectedly returns with the fleece, King Pelias refuses to honor the bargain. Once again, it is Medea to the rescue. Pretending she has a magic charm to make the king young again, she tricks his daughters into killing him. Outraged at this “regicide,” the people of Iolcus force Jason and Medea to flee to Corinth, where they live happily for ten years and have two children. As fate would have it, though, the couple’s life unravels when Jason falls in love with the king of Corinth’s daughter. Not one to take such a betrayal lying down, Medea kills her two sons and flees to Athens, where she has a son named Medus with the king of Athens. Broken, sick, and old, Jason is sitting beneath the prow of the
Argo
, when a piece of it breaks off and kills him. Medea is later banished back to Colchis. But she lives on as a central character in the tragedies of the playwright Euripides.

Which Argonaut was a god of healing?

If you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, a pharmacy, or a hospital, you’ve probably seen it and wondered—why is there a symbol of a double snake entwined around a staff? This emblem of the medical profession is actually a mistake of sorts, and originates with Asclepius, depicted by Homer as a tribal wound-healer, and also one of Jason’s Argonauts, who was no doubt brought along on the trip for his healing skills.
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Like Jason, Asclepius is raised by Chiron, the wise centaur. As a baby, Asclepius is sent to live with the mythical creature, after Asclepius’s divine father, Apollo, discovers that his lover, Coronis, had been unfaithful to him while pregnant with their child. Miffed at the betrayal, Apollo does what any jilted Greek god might do—he strikes this woman with a bolt of lightning. Before she dies, however, Apollo suffers remorse. As Ovid tells it:

Apollo rescues his unborn child, who goes on to become an important Greek god, revered as the inventor of medicine throughout both ancient Greece and Rome, where he was known as Aesculapius.

From ancient records, we know that the Greeks held Asclepius in very high esteem. During plagues and in times of illness, the Greeks prayed to him for help and relief, setting up special temples where they went to communicate with him. Epidaurus, the site of several ancient Greek ruins including a famous outdoor theater built in the 300s BCE, was a special gathering place of the first physicians, who were known as the Asclepians. The ruins of an ancient temple honoring their patron was also found near the Epidaurus theater, apparently a place where many sick people went in hope that Asclepius would cure them through their dreams while they slept in a nearby guesthouse. By 200 BCE, according to Roy Porter’s history of medicine,
Blood and Guts
, every Greek city-state had its temple to the god, where sick pilgrims slept overnight in special incubation chambers before an image of the healer god.

The admiration for Asclepius in Rome was equal to that of Greece. Not only did the Romans build a major shrine to the healing god after their city was delivered from a plague, they equipped the Asclepian temples with baths to capitalize on the healing power of water. The priests of Asclepius supposedly had extensive knowledge of herbal cures and other natural remedies—what we might call “alternative” treatments today—and crowds flocked to the “spas” of the ancient experts for these remedies as people today seek out spa treatments around the world.

Interestingly, the revered Asclepius gets into trouble in Greek myth when he oversteps his bounds. This happens when he uses his healing gifts to try and revive a dead man. Offended by this, Hades complains to Zeus, who delivers to Asclepius the same fate as Apollo had dealt his mother—Asclepius is killed with a thunderbolt and sent to the underworld. When Apollo discovers what has happened, he grants Asclepius divine status as the god of medicine.

Was Hippocrates a man or myth?

In contrast to the mythical Asclepius, there is a historical basis to the life of the other most famous doctor of ancient Greece, Hippocrates. (430?-380? BCE). Often called the father of medicine, Hippocrates was a well-known ancient physician who practiced medicine on the Greek island of Cos. Hippocrates challenged the notion of using magic, myth, and witchcraft to treat disease. Taking the fairly radical step of dismissing “root-gatherers, diviners and others whom they dismissed as ignoramuses and quacks,” as medical historian Roy Porter writes, Hippocrates and his followers believed that diseases had natural causes and could therefore be studied and possibly cured according to the workings of nature. As Porter puts it, “No longer pretending to be an intercessor with the gods, the true doctor would be the wise and trusty bedside friend of the sick.”

While there is no evidence that he actually wrote the texts attributed to him, which probably derive from a variety of hands over time, Hippocrates is still credited with teaching his followers, the first physicians, to view the patient as a whole; accept that much healing takes place naturally; follow a simple diet to achieve good health; and regard the first duty of the doctor as to his patients rather than to himself. The profound maxim that permeates medicine today, “First do no harm,” is attributed to his
Epidemics
, but is not actually part of the Hippocratic Oath, a modern version of which is still recited by many new doctors.

Was Atlantis ever discussed in Greek myth?

As fantastical places go, the so-called Lost Continent of Atlantis has had a long and intriguing history, peppered by inspiring stories, theories, bad science-fiction movies, a recent Disney animated feature, and even a sixties rock song by the pop singer Donovan (“Way down below the ocean/Where I want to be”). In the seventeenth century, a Jesuit writer published
Underwater World
, placing Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean. Jules Verne included a description of Atlantis in his nineteenth-century adventure classic
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. But contrary to popular belief, the story of this ancient but highly advanced civilization that disappeared beneath the ocean is nowhere to be found in ancient myth—either in Hesiod or Homer. What we know of Atlantis—“the island of Atlas”—actually comes from a rather unlikely source—
Timaeus
and
Critias
. These two “dialogues” were composed by the philosopher Plato (428–348 BCE), the pupil of Socrates, who founded the Academy—later called the School of Athens—which flourished for more than nine hundred years.
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Plato readily acknowledged that what he knew of Atlantis had been handed down through a long series of storytellers and was possibly first spoken of by Egyptian priests—giving the impression of a long round of the game of “telephone,” played out in ancient times. According to Plato’s version, a brilliant and highly superior, wealthy and powerful civilization once existed on the isle of Atlantis, supposedly located beyond the Pillars of Heracles. This would have been the Strait of Gibraltar, which would place Atlantis in the ocean named after the legendary island, the Atlantic. But recently, others have argued that these pillars are actually the Bosporus Strait, which separates the Black Sea from the Mediterranean Sea, and that Atlantis truly existed in the Mediterranean.