Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After Hippolytus died—dragged by his own horses when a bull from the sea panicked them, in the wake of Theseus’s curse and Phaedra’s false charge—some classical accounts say Asclepius restored him to life. Handbook tradition lists Hippolytus among those Asclepius raised (with Capaneus, Lycurgus, or others in variant catalogues). The return of a mortal from death angers Zeus (or Hades): the thunderbolt that kills Asclepius is motivated in part by this overturning of mortal limit. Apollodorus and Pausanias preserve the raise-and-bolt sequence in the Asclepiad dossier; Trozenian cult remembered Hippolytus as a hero, and later Italian lore (Virbius in Diana’s grove at Aricia) is a **Roman** continuation of the revived Hippolytus, not the Greek core. Catalogue this file as the resurrection episode distinct from Euripides’ irreversible death and from the general Asclepius birth–death narrative.