Chiron

A different birth

Chiron is a Centaur, a being with the upper body of a man and the body of a horse. The ancient sources do more than make him the kindest of the Centaurs. They give him a different family. The poet Pindar traces the other Centaurs back to Ixion, to a cloud shaped like the goddess Hera, and to the mares of Pelion. Chiron’s parents are quite different.

Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose Library retells the Greek myths, makes Chiron the son of the god Cronus and of Philyra, an Oceanid, or daughter of Ocean. Cronus takes the form of a horse when he comes to her. Their child is born with a double body (Library 1.2.4). So Chiron’s character differs from the others because his birth already did.

His stories turn the violence of the other Centaurs around. At the wedding of Peirithous, the Centaurs break the rules that bind guests and hosts. Chiron keeps a household instead. Children are sent to him. They stay for years and leave with the knowledge and discipline their later lives need.

Asclepius on Pelion

Pindar comes back to the same home, Chiron’s cave on Mount Pelion, in three different poems. Each poem brings a different child to it.

The first is the poem known as the third Pythian ode. In it, the god Apollo saves the unborn Asclepius from the funeral fire of his mother, Coronis. He carries the child to Chiron, whom the poem calls the Magnesian Centaur. Chiron teaches Asclepius to treat pain, wounds and disease. He uses spoken charms, medicines and surgery.

The poem does not make Chiron perfect. It does make his house the place where the human art of healing is passed on.

Jason and Achilles

In the fourth Pythian ode, the young hero Jason arrives before King Pelias and explains where he has been. He has spent 20 years with Chiron, away from the violence and lies of men, and has come from the Centaur’s cave. He names the women of the household: Philyra, and Chiron’s wife, Chariclo. The poem gives no single lesson. The length of his stay makes Pelion the place of his childhood.

The third Nemean ode, another poem by Pindar, brings Achilles to the same door. At six years old he already hunts without dogs. He carries the bodies of lions and boars back to Chiron. Apollodorus tells how this began. Peleus, the father of Achilles, places the baby in the Centaur’s care, and Chiron feeds him and names him. Pindar’s scene is sharper, because it shows the teaching as it happens, with the boy coming back to the house of Philyra from the mountain around it.

These three pupils do not make Chiron the founder of a school. Each relationship comes from a separate poem. Together, they show why his cave on Pelion is more than an animal’s den. It is a home where gods and fathers bring their children.

The wound he cannot heal

Apollodorus gives Chiron an ending that tests this difference hardest. First, the Lapiths, the people whose wedding the Centaurs attacked, drive him from Pelion to Malea. Later, Heracles fights other Centaurs there. One of his arrows passes through the arm of the Centaur Elatus and sticks in Chiron’s knee. Its point carries poison from the monster called the Hydra. Chiron withdraws and treats the wound, but it cannot be cured.

A mortal would have died and the pain would have ended. Chiron’s divine birth prevents this. He is immortal, so he can neither get well nor die. The healer who taught Asclepius now has a wound his own skill cannot reach.

Prometheus and the end of Chiron

Apollodorus resolves this only when Heracles bargains to free Prometheus, the Titan held in chains. The god Zeus accepts Chiron as the immortal willing to die in Prometheus’s place. The exchange ends Chiron’s suffering and frees the Titan.

This ending fits the rest of Chiron’s story. It completes the reason he stands apart from the other Centaurs. His horse’s body links him to them. His birth, his household and his conduct set him apart from their shared story.

Even his death comes from no battle with humans. It comes from an accident and a wound that cannot be cured. It ends when he gives up, by choice, the immortality that kept him alive in pain.