Mount Pelion

Chiron’s cave on the mountain

Mount Pelion is a mountain in Thessaly, and in myth it belongs first to Chiron. Chiron is a Centaur: his body crosses the line between man and horse. The poet Pindar sets him in the glens of Pelion and calls his home a cave.

Heroes come to that cave to learn. The god Apollo carries the infant Asclepius there after the death of Coronis. Chiron teaches the child to treat wounds and disease. In time the pupil’s skill goes past the limit that Zeus will allow a mortal healer.

The stories do not describe one set course of lessons shared by every pupil. They do keep returning to the same cave as the place where skill is handed down.

Jason’s twenty years

The hero Jason receives a longer education. In Pindar’s fourth Pythian ode, one of his poems of praise, Jason returns to Iolcus. He tells people who he is by naming the household he has left.

He has spent twenty years in that household, with Chiron, Chariclo and Philyra. In all that time, he says, he did no crooked act and spoke no crooked word.

Later Jason will claim his father’s rule and go in search of the Golden Fleece. Before he does either, Pelion gives him the training by which he presents himself to the world.

The bride who changes shape

Peleus, a mortal, takes hold of Thetis, a sea goddess. Chiron has told him that if he lets go of her, he will lose her. So Peleus holds on while she turns into fire, then water, then a beast. He keeps his grip until she returns to her own form.

Apollodorus, who retold the Greek myths, then moves straight to Pelion. The pair marry there, and the gods gather for the feast. The mountain becomes a meeting place for powers that usually stay apart. A mortal takes an immortal bride. Sea divinities climb into the Thessalian woods, and the Olympian gods sit at the feast.

Chiron gives Peleus an ash spear, the spear that Achilles will later carry at Troy. The god Poseidon gives the immortal horses Balius and Xanthus.

How the wedding foretells Achilles

The playwright Euripides turns the wedding into a procession across the mountain. The Muses come over Pelion’s slopes with pipes and lyres. Fifty Nereids, the sea divinities of the story, dance in a circle. Centaurs lean on fir trees, and Ganymede pours wine for Zeus. Chiron speaks above them all and names the future child of Peleus and Thetis.

The prophecy is more than a blessing. Achilles will bring light to Thessaly, travel with the Myrmidons and burn Troy. The god Hephaestus will make his armour.

Euripides sets that splendid future beside Iphigenia. Her father has brought her to Aulis with the false promise that she will marry Achilles. So one wedding on Pelion is used to show another wedding up as a trap.

The wedding on a painted vase

A painted vase known as the François Vase gives the feast a physical form. It was made in the sixth century BC. Around it runs a frieze, a band of painted figures, that shows a procession of named gods coming to Peleus and Thetis.

Chiron leads the procession with the goddess Iris, carrying game over his shoulder. Peleus waits at the house. The vase does not copy the chorus of Euripides. But both the vase and the play show the wedding as a great gathering of guests.

Achilles returns to the mountain

The mountain holds a sequence of events, more than a single episode. Chiron teaches heroes whose later lives fill several books of myth. The gods arrive for the marriage. Achilles is born from that match. Peleus brings the infant to Chiron after Thetis leaves, and Pelion becomes the child’s second home. Pindar pictures the boy coming back from the hunt with his first catch.

In the later story of the Trojan War, Eris is left out of the feast. She sends the golden apple that starts the quarrel between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Apollodorus’s account of the wedding does not include that episode, and Euripides is concerned with the prophecy of Achilles. So the wedding belongs to Pelion, but not every later detail belongs to every ancient telling.

The teacher gives Peleus a spear at the feast. Later he receives Peleus’s son and prepares him to use it.