Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Apollo loved Coronis, daughter of Phlegyas of Thessaly (or, in Epidaurian local myth, of other parents). She conceived Asclepius. While pregnant she took a mortal lover, Ischys son of Elatus. A crow (or raven) brought the news to Apollo; in anger the god cursed the bird—once white, thereafter black (etiology clearest in later poetic tradition)—and Artemis (or Apollo himself) shot Coronis dead. As her body burned on the pyre, Apollo snatched the unborn child from the flames and gave him to the centaur Chiron to rear. Chiron taught Asclepius medicine and surgery until he surpassed all healers, even restoring the dead to life (Hippolytus, among others, in various lists; Capaneus, Lycurgus, or Glaucus in handbook variants). Zeus, fearing that mortals would escape death and upset the cosmic order—or angered at Hades’ loss of subjects—struck Asclepius with a thunderbolt and killed him. Apollo, grieving and enraged, killed the Cyclopes who forge Zeus’s thunderbolts. Zeus would have cast Apollo into Tartarus, but Leto interceded; instead Apollo was sentenced to serve a mortal for a year. He became herdsman to Admetus of Pherae, whose flocks prospered under the god’s care—the prelude Euripides assumes at the opening of *Alcestis*. Asclepius himself was later received among the gods or honored as a hero-healer; his sons Machaon and Podalirius fight at Troy as physicians.