Who from the blameless Æsculapius sprung;’[105]
which is just as much as if he had said, ‘Call a man who is a son of a god.’”[106]
In the indulgence of their myth-forming fancies it was very reasonable, very wise, on the part of the Greeks to make Æsculapius the offspring of Apollo. If the god of medicine be viewed as a personification of the healing powers of nature, what more rational, as has been observed, than to take him to be “the son, the effects of Helios, Apollo, or the sun.”[107]
The mythological history of the Grecian god of medicine is strange and interesting. One must know it, or he will remain in the dark about many things bearing on the symbolism and other features of the physician’s art.
Æsculapius was the result, so the story runs, of a criminal liaison between Apollo and a young virgin, named Coronis, a native of Thessaly—something which the myth-makers apparently did not regard as discreditable. The morals of many of the gods were exceedingly bad. “Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints,”[108] is a candid remark of Thoreau. It would appear that the ancients were corrupted by communication with the gods.
It is recorded of Coronis that she was, like too many of the sex, fickle, and did not prove faithful to her divine paramour; she stealthily cultivated a criminal intimacy with an Arcadian youth, named Ischys. The fact of her infidelity becoming known to Apollo, either through a message of a raven,[109] or his own divine powers, he, naturally enough, was greatly displeased. And the wrath of the divinity was followed by a series of remarkable events.
At this point it may be well to state that the parentage of Æsculapius was a question which early excited attention. A belief existed that “he was the offspring of Arsinoë” and “a citizen of the Messenians,” as Pausanias informs us. Apollophanes, an Arcadian,[110] being interested in the matter, went to Delos, and, putting the question of its truth to the Pythian deity, received this reply:—
“O Æsculapius! source of mighty joy
To mortal natures; whom Coronis fair,
Daughter of Phlegyas, once with me conjoin’d,