Chiron, the gentle centaur who taught Greece's greatest heroes
Most centaurs in Greek myth were drunken brawlers. Chiron was the exception, hailed as the wisest and most just of his kind. Fostered by Apollo, he mastered medicine, music and prophecy, then raised Achilles, Jason and Asclepius, the future god of doctors, on the slopes of Mount Pelion.
His difference began with his birth. Ordinary centaurs descended from Ixion and a cloud shaped to resemble Hera. Chiron's father was the Titan Cronus, said to have taken the form of a horse, and his mother the nymph Philyra, who abandoned the baby in shame. Apollo took him in and taught him healing, music, archery and prophecy, while Artemis trained him in hunting. Some scholars think he began as a Thessalian god later folded into the Greek myths as a centaur.
Artists marked his distinction. Early Greek images give him human front legs instead of a full horse body, and often clothes, something few other centaurs wear. He frequently carries a branch hung with hares from a hunt. Roman painters, perhaps working from written descriptions rather than Greek models, gave him a fully equine body and pointed satyr-like ears, as in a fresco from Herculaneum showing him teaching Achilles the lyre, though they kept a laurel wreath to signal nobility.
His roster of pupils reads like a list of culture heroes. He raised Achilles on a diet that included lion innards and bear marrow and, in some accounts, gave him his name. He trained Asclepius in healing after Apollo rescued the infant, and sheltered the baby Jason, whose mother pretended he had been stillborn to hide him from a usurping uncle. Aristaeus, later a god of beekeeping and cheesemaking, grew up in his care, and Medus, son of Medea, went on to become first king of the Medes.
Chiron also played protector. He rescued Peleus when an enemy stranded him weaponless among hostile centaurs, and advised him how to win the sea nymph Thetis, the future mother of Achilles. Ancient Greeks credited him with founding botany and pharmacy, and a local family noted for medical skill, the Cheironidae, claimed descent from him.
Source: Chiron
