ganymedesrocks:A marble relief from Herculaneum. Achilles scrapes rust from his spear into the wound
ganymedesrocks:A marble relief from Herculaneum. Achilles scrapes rust from his spear into the wound of Telephus.Frazer notes that the spear was the famous one which Chiron the Centaur had bestowed on Peleus, the father of Achilles. The shaft was cut from an ash-tree on Mount Pelion, and none of the Greeks at Troy, except Achilles, could wield it. The healing of Telephus’s wound by Achilles was the subject of a play by Sophocles, called The Assembly of the Achaeans (of which only a tiny fragment survives), and one by Euripides (also lost) called Telephus (438 BC). The cure of a wound by rust from the weapon which inflicted the hurt is not to be explained, as Pliny supposed, by any medicinal property inherent in rust as such, else the rust from any weapon would serve; it is more likely a folklore remedy based on sympathetic magic. It is almost certainly the myth of Achilles and Telephus to which Goethe refers in his poem Torquato Tasso: “The poet tells us of a spear which yet Might cure the wound that it itself had dealt If friendly hand were but to place it there.” -- source link