Things Take a Turn for the Worse
Life was going pretty well until I was lured into the shadowy realms of life and death. I had always believed that if the gods decided a patient was to get better, then I must use my skill to aid in this endeavor. If the Fates had decreed a patient was to die, there was little I could do against the will of the gods. Then events occurred that would enable me to take things to a whole new level, and—once again—it was because of sex.
Theseus was the king of Athens. He became king when his father committed suicide, thinking wrongly that Theseus was dead. This was not an auspicious start for a ruler. When Theseus’ first wife died, he married the princess Phaedra, daughter of the Cretan King Minos—a truly freaky chick. Theseus had a grown son, Hippolytus, who had rugged good looks and a bright future, a real stud. Phaedra decided Hippolytus would be a better husband for her than his father, but Hippolytus spurned her advances. Phaedra, in her wrath, turned Theseus against his son. Theseus used his own godly contacts and convinced Neptune to deal with Hippolytus. While Hippolytus was driving a chariot along a coastal road, Neptune set a sea monster to rise up from the ocean, scaring Theseus’ horse, which led to a fatal crash.
The goddess Diana, my aunt, came to me and taught me the secret to reviving the dead. Don’t expect me to share it with you. No “see one, do one, teach one” from me. I’ll just say it involves very small thunderbolts. I would have been better off without the knowledge. Using the new technique, I revived Hippolytus, who spent the rest of his days in Italy with a water nymph named Egeria. Not a bad afterlife. My trouble, on the other hand, had just begun. Pluto, god of the underworld, was furious. He thought no man should remove the dead from his realm. It was a classic turf battle, and I lost. Jupiter, my grandfather, was forced to put me to death with a thunderbolt.
Life after Death
My name lived on. The earliest places of healing were temples of Aesculapius; the Iatros, who worked there, were the earliest physicians. Yes, they did make me a god, but it’s not like I could stop them. On the island of Kós, my thousandth grandson was named Hippocrates—you may have heard of him. Another of my descendants, Galen, trained at my temple in Pergamon.
It’s been a few thousand years since all of this happened. Don’t ask how you can be reading my words—it’s a mythology thing. Things did not go well for Apollo after I died. When he heard I had been killed, my father lost his temper and took out his wrath on the cyclops who had made Jupiter’s thunderbolts on Mount Aetna. His punishment for that temper tantrum was to serve a mortal, Admetus, for a year. Admetus fell ill; near death, he convinced Apollo to appeal to the Fates. They agreed that someone would take his place. Nobody in the kingdom volunteered for this duty, not even his elderly parents. Finally his wife Alcestis volunteered, and her fate was set. When Death came for her, Hercules, who was passing through, seized Death and would not let him go until she was spared.