Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Asclepius, the greatest healer in all of Greek mythology. He was the son of Apollo, the god of healing, trained in the healing arts by the immortal centaur Chiron, and though he brought much good into the world with his restorative power, he would eventually be killed by Zeus, who believed that the powers Asclepius had cultivated - specifically, his power to bring the dead back to life - were too potent to be wielded by mortal hands, that unless Asclepius' life was put to an end, the crystalline divide that separated the realm of mortality from the realm of divinity would be eroded, upsetting the natural order; Zeus' execution of Asclepius precipitating a cascading sequence of events that resulted in the the death of the cyclopes who forged Zeus' thunderbolts and resulted in Apollo becoming the slave of a mortal man for one year.

Let's get into it.

Asclepius was a man renowned for his miraculous healing ability, later attaining his apotheosis when he became deified as a god of healing and medicine. There are many versions of his parentage, each one with Apollo as the father. Arsinoe was the mother in one, but more commonly it was Coronis, a Thessalian princess, who was the mother; and with her there are multiple versions of Aslcepius' birth. In one, after having intercourse with Apollo, she later lay with another, a mortal man, whom she actually favoured over the god. This enraged Apollo, so he killed her (another telling says that it was the golden arrows of Artemis that Killed Cornis). Before her body was consumed by the fire of the funeral pyre it was laid on, either he or Hermes cut open her belly and pulled the child free from her body, making for one of the more gruesome and unconventional births in Greek mythology.

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