Exhortation to the Greeks 2.30

Hephaestus, whom Zeus threw out of Olympus “from the divine threshold,” fell on Lemnos and worked as a smith, lame in both feet, “and his slender shins moved nimbly beneath him.” You have a physician among the gods too, not only a smith; but the physician was a lover of money, and his name was Asclepius. I will set before you your own poet, the Boeotian Pindar: “Gold, shown in his hands, turned even him with a lordly fee; and so the son of Kronos, hurling with his hands through both of them, swiftly took the breath from their breasts, and the blazing thunderbolt struck them dead.” And Euripides: “For Zeus is to blame, who killed my son Asclepius, casting fire into his breast.” He lies, then, thunderstruck, in the territory of Cynosuris. Philochorus says that at Tenos Poseidon is honored as a physician, and that Sicily lies on top of Kronos, who was buried there. Patrocles of Thurii and Sophocles the Younger, in some of their tragedies, tell the story of the Dioscuri: these two Dioscuri were mortal men, if Homer is enough to confirm what is said: “But them the life-giving earth already held, in Lacedaemon, there in their own dear native land.” Let the author of the Cypria come forward too: “Castor was mortal, and the lot of death was fated for him; but Polydeuces was immortal, offshoot of Ares.” This was a poet's lie; Homer is more trustworthy than he, when he speaks of both the Dioscuri, and moreover shows Heracles to be a mere phantom, for he calls him “a mortal, Heracles, well versed in great deeds.” So Homer himself knows Heracles as a mortal man; and Hieronymus the philosopher even describes the build of his body: small, bristly-haired, and strong; while Dicaearchus says he was lean, sinewy, dark, hook-nosed, with bright eyes and straight hair. This Heracles lived fifty-two years and ended his life cremated on the pyre on Oeta.