Phlegyas

Phlegyas set fire to Apollo’s temple at Delphi after discovering that the god had violated his daughter Coronis. Apollo struck Phlegyas down for the attack. Phlegyas was the son of Ares and Dotis, and the eponymous hero of the Phlegyans. Another tradition makes him King of the Lapiths and the brother of Ixion.

Coronis lived beside Thessalian Lake Beobeis, where she washed her feet. Apollo became her lover and left a snow-white crow to guard her while he went to Delphi. Coronis, already pregnant by Apollo, secretly desired Ischys, an Arcadian and the son of Elatus. She admitted him to her couch. Apollo perceived her infidelity before the crow reached Delphi with its report. He cursed the bird for failing to attack Ischys, and its feathers turned black. Its descendants remained black thereafter.

Apollo told Artemis of the insult. Artemis shot Coronis with a quiverful of arrows. When Apollo looked upon her body, he felt remorse, but he could not restore her life. As her relatives placed her in a wooden pyre, the fire of Hephaestus surrounded the structure. Apollo then saw his unborn child and seized him from the corpse. The flames parted before him. He took the child to the Magnesian Centaur, Cheiron, to learn the healing of diseases.

The child was Asclepios. In another account, Coronis had become Ischys’s wife against her father’s wishes, rather than merely taking him as a lover. The account connecting Phlegyas’s revenge with Apollo’s assault on Coronis gives no further cause for the attack beyond his discovery of it. After the temple burned, Phlegyas met his death. One tradition says that Apollo killed him, while another says that Lykos and Nyktimos brought about his death.