Chiron- Greek CreatureCreature · Hybrid"The Wisest of the Centaurs"

Divine Origins

Most centaurs descended from Ixion and a cloud shaped like Hera. They were wild from conception. Chiron came from different blood. His father was the Titan Kronos, his mother the Oceanid nymph Philyra. Kronos pursued Philyra on the island that later bore her name, and when his wife Rhea discovered them, he transformed himself into a stallion to flee. Philyra conceived and gave birth to a creature with the upper body of a man and the lower body of a horse. Horrified by her son's form, she begged the gods to change her. They turned her into a linden tree.

Chiron was half-brother to Zeus and Poseidon. He was born immortal.

Teacher of Heroes

Chiron made his home in a cave on Mount Pelion in Thessaly, where healing herbs grew on the slopes that could be found nowhere else in Greece. The mountain itself loomed over the plains of Magnesia, one of the peaks the giants Otus and Ephialtes had tried to pile onto Ossa to storm Olympus. There Chiron took in the sons of kings and heroes.

He raised Achilles from infancy after the sea-nymph Thetis entrusted her son to his care. He fed the child on the entrails of lions and the marrow of bears to build courage, and on honey to give him sweetness of speech. He taught Achilles to run down deer on foot without dogs and to play the lyre. Pindar says he taught gentle-handed remedies alongside music and training at arms. When the boy sailed for Troy years later, he carried a spear of Pelian ash that Chiron had cut and given to his father Peleus, so heavy that no other Greek could wield it.

Jason was hidden from his usurping uncle Pelias and brought secretly to Pelion as a child. Chiron raised him and gave him the name Jason, meaning "healer." For years the centaur trained him for the quest that awaited. When the Argo sailed past Pelion, Chiron descended to the shore with his wife Chariclo and the infant Achilles in her arms, and waved farewell to his former pupil.

The Healer's Art

Apollo rescued the unborn Asclepius from his mother Coronis's funeral pyre and brought him to Chiron. The centaur taught him everything he knew of herbs and surgery. The centaury plant bore Chiron's name: he had discovered it could staunch bleeding when treating his own injuries, and this knowledge, with everything else he possessed, passed to Asclepius. The pupil learned all Chiron could teach. Then he raised the dead.

Chiron also possessed the gift of prophecy. He could read the movements of the stars and the flight of birds, and this knowledge let him advise the heroes who sought his cave and foresee the fates that awaited them.

The Wedding on Pelion

When Peleus, one of Chiron's former pupils, sought to win the sea-nymph Thetis, the centaur told him how. Thetis could change shape at will to escape any pursuer. Chiron counseled Peleus to hold fast no matter what form she took, and the hero obeyed, wrestling her through fire and serpent-form until she yielded and consented to the marriage.

The wedding was celebrated at Chiron's cave on Mount Pelion, and all the gods attended. Apollo played the lyre, and the Muses sang. It was the last time mortals and immortals feasted together. Eris, uninvited, threw the golden apple inscribed "For the Fairest," and from that quarrel came the Judgment of Paris and the war at Troy.

The Wound

Chiron's end came from a wound he could not cure. When Heracles visited the centaur Pholus, a quarrel over wine erupted into battle between the hero and the wild centaurs. In the chaos, one of Heracles' arrows, tipped with the Hydra's blood, struck Chiron in the knee. It had passed through another centaur first.

The venom was incurable. Any mortal would have died within hours, but Chiron was immortal. He could not die to escape the pain. He retreated to his cave and tried every remedy he had ever taught Asclepius, every herb Pelion's slopes had yielded in a lifetime of gathering. Nothing worked. The healer who had taught Asclepius could not heal himself.

Death and the Stars

Prometheus, the Titan who had stolen fire for humanity, was chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where Zeus's eagle ate his liver each day and it regrew each night. Zeus had decreed that Prometheus would go free only if an immortal surrendered his own deathless life in exchange.

Chiron, longing for release from his agony, took the bargain. He renounced his deathless life, and Prometheus was unchained at last. Zeus placed Chiron among the stars as the constellation Centaurus, his image fixed in the sky above the mountain where he had lived and taught.