V.V. (18) Asclepius

[jbor]

The myth is actually quite resonant for the chapter:

Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, was the son of Apollo, god of prophecy,
and the lake nymph Coronis. In mythology he is a somewhat shadowy figure,
which suggest his late arrival as a major deity. Asclepius would seem to
have been a Thessalanian healer whose skills became known throughout Greece:
his cult eventually took over the sanctuary at Epidaurus in the Pelopennese.
Sacred snakes resident there were believed to embody the god's healing
power. The ancient association between snakes and medicine is probably due
to the snake's apparent ability to renew its youth each year by sloughing
off its own skin.

Only the stories of Asclepius' birth and death were ever well known to the
Greeks and Romans. When Coronis dared to take in secret a mortal as a second
lover, an enraged Apollo sent his sister Artemis to kill the lake nymph with
a disease. However, as the flames of the funeral pyre burned Coronis, Apollo
felt sorry for his unborn son and removed him from the corpse. Thus was
Asclepius born. He was taught medicine by the Centaur, Chiron, whose
knowledge was so great that Zeus himself feared that Asclepius might learn a
way of overcoming death. When he did succeed in resurrecting one of his
patients, Zeus decided that Asclepius should be punished for threatening the
gods' monopoly over immortality. Asclepius was slain by a thunder-bolt, but
at Apollo's request the god of medicine was placed among the stars, as
Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer.

So impressed were the Romans by Asclepius' cult that during a time of plague
they requested aid from Epidauros and a sacred snake was duly shipped to
Rome. (Cotterell's Encyclopedia, p. 24)

Elsewhere, Dr Mary Beard notes that the Roman god was "imported directly
from the Greek world ( ... Aesculapius, god of medicine, derived from the
Greek Asklepios who was introduced to Rome in 293 BC on the instructions of
an oracle following a devastating plague.") (Willis ed., p. 168)

best

> Melanie is putatively the "daughter" of Apollo
> (394.23) and is thus linked -- perhaps ironically -- to Asclepius, who with
> his staff and serpent (cf. the pole on which Su Feng is impaled, the dragons
> on her silk tights?) was the Greek god of healing. The gender bending which
> goes on later in Melanie's tryst with V foregrounds the allegory imo.