A centaur of double form, son of Cronus by the Oceanid Philyra, who surpassed not only the other centaurs but men in justice and reared Asclepius and Achilles in his cave on Mount Pelion.1
Apollodorus names him simply: to Cronus and Philyra was born Chiron, a centaur of double form. Apollonius tells how it came about — while Cronus reigned over the Titans in Olympus and Zeus was still being nursed in the Cretan cave, he lay with Philyra, daughter of Ocean, having deceived Rhea; surprised in their dalliance, Cronus sprang up in the shape of a flowing-maned steed, and Philyra in shame fled to the long Pelasgian ridges, where by her union with the transfigured god she brought forth huge Chiron, half horse and half divine. Hyginus adds the bitter end of his mother: appalled at the strange creature she had borne, Philyra begged the gods to change her shape and was turned into the linden tree, while Chiron, he says, was the first to invent the art of healing.2
He raised the founder of medicine. When Apollo snatched the unborn Asclepius from the burning body of Coronis, he carried him to Chiron the centaur, by whom the child was reared and taught the arts of healing and hunting, until he carried surgery to such a pitch that he not only kept men from dying but raised the dead. Ovid stages the same fosterage — the god bore the infant to the cave of double-natured Chiron, who took pride in so godlike a charge and taught his pupil there.3
He was the maker of Achilles too. When Thetis, prevented from burning away her son's mortal part, forsook the infant and returned to the Nereids, Peleus brought the child to Chiron, who received him, fed him on the inwards of lions and wild swine and the marrows of bears, and named him Achilles. Chiron had served the father before the son: when the centaurs of Pelion set upon Peleus and he would have perished, Chiron saved him and restored the sword he had lost, and it was Chiron who counselled Peleus to seize the shape-shifting Thetis and hold her fast until she resumed her own form — so the marriage that bore Achilles was made on his advice. Apollonius shows him at the parting of the Argonauts: down from the mountain-top to the sea came Chiron, son of Philyra, and dipping his feet where the white surf broke, he waved his broad hand and cried 'Good speed and a sorrowless home-return!' — and with him his wife, bearing Peleus' son Achilles on her arm to show the boy to his departing father.4
Other foster-children passed through his hands. Apollodorus records that Actaeon, son of Autonoe and Aristaeus, was bred by Chiron to be a hunter — before his own hounds devoured him on Cithaeron. Hesiod tells that when Jason brought Medea to Iolcus and she bore him a son, Medeus, it was Chiron the son of Philyra who brought the boy up in the mountains.5
His death came by accident through the greatest of his pupils' kin. Pursuing the wild centaurs after the riot at Pholus' cave, Heracles shot an arrow that passed through the arm of Elatus and lodged in Chiron's knee; grieved, Heracles ran up, drew the shaft, and applied the very medicine Chiron gave him, but the hurt — venomed with the Hydra's blood — could not be cured. Chiron withdrew to his cave wishing to die, yet could not, being immortal, until Prometheus offered himself to die in his stead and so released him. Hyginus, who makes the wound a fallen arrow rather than a loosed one, says that for his conscientiousness and justice Jupiter pitied him and set him among the stars as the Centaur, holding a victim above the altar.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
