Almost every culture has a story about the point where a healer goes too far. The Greeks told it about Asclepius, the first and greatest physician, who learned to bring the dead back to life and was destroyed for it. I find this story more honest than most, because it does not pretend the answer is simple. The god who kills Asclepius is the same one who later makes him a god. The cult built in his memory spent centuries doing exactly what he was killed for doing, only with permission. So the myth is really about a boundary, and about how nervous the Greeks were about where it sat.
A birth by fire
His story starts violently. Asclepius is the son of Apollo and a mortal woman, Coronis, according to Pindar's third Pythian ode. Coronis is pregnant with the god's child when she takes up with another man. A white raven carries the news to Apollo, who is so angry that he turns the bird black for bringing it. Then either he or his sister Artemis kills Coronis with arrows.
As she lies on the funeral pyre, Apollo feels pity for the unborn child. He snatches it out of the flames and takes the baby to the centaur Chiron, who raised many heroes on Mount Pelion and who teaches the boy medicine. The detail never fails to strike me: the first doctor in myth is taken, literally, from a fire, and is raised by something half-animal on a mountain. His training is not in a city but with the wild.
Not yet a god
In the Iliad, Asclepius is not a god at all. He is a man, a blameless physician, and his two sons Machaon and Podalirius are doctors in the Greek army at Troy. Machaon treats wounded kings on the battlefield, sucking out the blood from a wound with his mouth and spreading soothing medicines over it. So in the oldest layer, Asclepius is a famous human healer whose sons are the military medics of the age.
That is a useful starting point. It means he was remembered as a real kind of person, a skilled doctor, long before he was promoted. The divinity comes later and has to be explained, and the explanation is the story of his death.
The blood of Medusa
This is where the myth gets bold. According to Apollodorus, the goddess Athena gives Asclepius a gift: the blood of the Gorgon Medusa. The blood from the veins on her left side is poison, which kills. The blood from her right side heals, and can even raise the dead.
I wrote about Medusa elsewhere on this site, and what I find extraordinary is how neatly this fits. The same body produces both effects. The thing that can turn a person to stone can also, drawn from the other side, bring one back. Medicine and poison come from one source, and the difference is only which vein you use. It is hard to think of a sharper way to say that every cure is a dose.
With the blood, Asclepius begins to resurrect people. The sources list names, among them the hero Hippolytus, killed by his father's curse, and a few warriors from the Theban wars. And then the trouble starts.
Why Zeus kills him
The reason depends on who you ask, and the differences are revealing.
In Pindar's version, the problem is greed. Asclepius takes a fee, in gold, to bring back a man who has died, and for accepting a reward for undoing death, Zeus strikes him down with a thunderbolt. It is a moral about taking money for something that should not be bought.
In another tradition, the complaint is practical. Hades goes to Zeus and complains that his kingdom is losing its population. If someone can keep raising the dead, the Underworld has nothing to rule. Zeus, who also fears that mortals will no longer be afraid of dying, kills Asclepius with lightning. Notice how different the arguments are. In Pindar, he is punished for corruption. In the other story, he is punished for success.
I prefer the second, because the first lets everyone off the hook. If the problem is only that he charged money, then a free resurrection would have been fine. The deeper version says that the objection is to the act itself, however it is paid for. There is a limit, and the doctor who works right up to it will be killed for reaching it.
Apollo, furious at the death of his son, takes revenge on the Cyclopes who forged the thunderbolt, and Zeus punishes him by making him serve a mortal master, King Admetus, as a herdsman for a year. It is the typical Greek outcome. Everyone loses something, nobody gets what they wanted.
The promotion
And here is the twist. After his death, Asclepius is set among the stars, as the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer, and becomes a god. The cult that grows up around him is one of the most successful in Greece, and it is organised around healing.
The main sanctuary was at Epidaurus, in the Peloponnese, and it is still one of the most impressive archaeological sites in Greece, with a theatre so well designed that you can hear a whisper from the top row. Pilgrims came from all over the Mediterranean. They would purify themselves, sacrifice, and then sleep overnight in a special hall, the abaton, hoping the god would appear in a dream. The practice is called incubation. Sometimes the god healed them in the dream itself, sometimes he gave instructions, such as a diet or a bath, to follow in the morning.
At Epidaurus, stone columns were set up recording cures. There are accounts of men whose wounds closed in the night, women who were unable to conceive and then did, and a blind man who woke with sight. Some of them are charmingly human: one patient, who had mocked the miracles, was cured and made to pay for his scepticism by setting up a silver pig as a dedication. These were not secret rites. They were advertisements, written down so that the next visitor would believe.
The cult travelled. It reached Athens around 420 BCE, and in 291 BCE, when a plague struck Rome, the Romans sent a delegation to Epidaurus, and according to the story a sacred snake came back with them on the ship and slithered ashore on Tiber Island. A temple was built there, and the island was shaped like a ship's prow in stone. A hospital stands on the same spot today.
The god who was killed for raising the dead ended up with temples all across the Mediterranean, doing something very close to the same work, only now through dreams and snakes and ordinary medicine.
One snake, one stick
His symbol is a staff with a single snake wound around it, the rod of Asclepius, and it is still used for medicine today. It is often confused with the caduceus of Hermes, which has two snakes and wings, but the one-snake rod is the original.
The doctor's oath was also his. The classic Hippocratic Oath begins by swearing by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea, two of his daughters, whose names are the roots of hygiene and panacea. A physician's first act in the ancient world was to call on the family of the man who had been struck down.
And my favourite detail of all comes at the end of Plato's Phaedo, in the last moments of Socrates. After drinking the hemlock, with the poison creeping up his legs, Socrates uncovers his face and says to his friend Crito: we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Pay it, and do not forget. People have debated for centuries what he meant. The most common reading is that he was thanking the god of healing for curing him of life. Whatever the intention, it is a remarkable scene. A man dying of a poisonous drink is making an offering to the god of medicine, as if death itself were the final remedy.
What I take from him
Here is how I read the whole thing. Asclepius is a story about a limit that nobody wants to name. Every culture that develops medicine finds, sooner or later, that it has a moral edge. How far do you go? When is a cure a theft? The Greeks did not answer. They let a god be killed at the edge, and then made him a god anyway.
That is, I think, deeply typical. The physician is both blasphemer and saviour. He cheats death and so is struck down, and the very act that gets him killed is the act that gets him worshipped. The same Gorgon blood, left side and right, kills and cures. And the temple at Epidaurus is full of people leaving offerings to the god Zeus destroyed, grateful to be treated by someone who knew exactly where the line was, and who crossed it.
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