Apollo_ The Origins and History of the Greek God

SAVE OFFLINE

Apollo: The Origins and History of the Greek God By Andrew Scott & Charles River Editors

An ancient statue depicting Apollo

About Charles River Editors

Charles River Editors is a boutique digital publishing company, specializing in bringing history back to life with educational and engaging books on a wide range of topics. Keep up to date with our new and free offerings with this 5 second sign up on our weekly mailing list, and visit Our Kindle Author Page to see other recently published Kindle titles. We make these books for you and always want to know our readers’ opinions, so we encourage you to leave reviews and look forward to publishing new and exciting titles each week.

Introduction

An ancient statue depicting Apollo with a lyre

Apollo “Foolish mortals and poor drudges are you, that you seek cares and hard toils and straits! Easily will I tell you a word and set it in your hearts. Though each one of you with knife in hand should slaughter sheep continually, yet would you always have abundant store, even all that the glorious tribes of men bring here for me. But guard you my temple and receive the tribes of men that gather to this place, and especially show mortal men my will, and do you keep righteousness in your heart.”[1] “Apollo’s history is a confusing one,”[2] said the renowned poet and mythologist Robert Graves. This notion is also illustrated in the above quote from the 6th century BCE Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which gives the reader a brief glimpse into the confusion surrounding Apollo’s multi-faceted nature. The quote comes from the end of an episode in which Apollo is traversing the known world, looking for a place to build a temple to himself. Once he lands upon a place of his liking, however, he realizes that he needs to populate it with priests who would ‘guard’ and care for its ceremonies. Rather than depend upon those ‘glorious tribes’ to supply his temple with sycophants,

Apollo has no patience for chance, and flies down to a Cretan merchant ship, landing on it in the form of a timber-shaking dolphin. After terrifying the merchants, he tells them that their lives in the sea trade are over, and they are to be priests at his temple from then on. Cautioning the merchants to eschew piracy and ‘keep righteousness’ in their hearts, while simultaneously confronting and sequestering them captures the youthful god’s capricious character quite well. Of course, the rest of the ancient Greek gods were certainly not above hypocrisy — the adultery of Zeus alone demonstrates that — but Apollo was a brash contrarian in the face of all divine order. Unlike many of the other Olympian gods, Apollo’s nature changed dramatically at the closing of his adolescence. His twin sister Artemis, in direct comparison with Apollo, immediately leapt to her mother’s aide as midwife to her brother after she was born. Artemis would continue to be a goddess of midwives, while Apollo’s “role” would continue to evolve over centuries. Naturally, there are many approaches to Greek myth and many variant opinions and strategies for unearthing “truths” in the mythological canon. For the purpose of unveiling the origins, development, and contemporary views of Apollo, it is necessary to see his myths firstly as remnants of the movements and actions of ancient peoples. This “Memory of Myth” can provide the modern reader with an analogous view of the history of a place and of a character. Much of Greek mythology is politico-religious history[3], and exploring how the episodes in these myths tie in with episodes in the historical record can reveal certain fascinating aspects of an often frustratingly murky past. An example of this “politico-religiosity” is demonstrated in the preceding quote from the Homeric Hymn. The merchant sailors were Cretans on their way to trade with the city of Pylos on the Greek mainland. During the “Minoan Civilisation” (c. 3650 - 1400 BCE), this was a very active and lucrative trade route for sailors from Crete and mainland Greece. Apollo sequestered and appropriated these Cretans for a religious purpose, just as the Achaeans did when they captured the Cretan Earth goddess’ shrine at Delphi. The heroic vanquishing of monsters and the banishment of mythological characters often echo real-world invasions and the appearance of superseding cults. Many historians have drawn a connection between these mythological

and historical episodes with enlightening results. Of course, there is little purpose in reducing all myth to poetic versions of real events. There was a dance between fact and faith in the ancient psyche, and the argument of whether ritual or belief came first is one that continues to rage today among the academic adherents on both sides. Often it is more fruitful to consider a deity in terms of his or her fundamental “powers” as perceived by the ancients. When Apollo falls beneath this microscope, the modern reader can see his fundamental “roles” emerge, and they bring with them the ubiquity of his character throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Ultimately, any 21st century study of a mythological being must gather together as many strands of learning as possible in order to formulate a useful hypothesis. In the case of Apollo, these strands are expansive, permeative, and international, and at first blush, they can seem very confusing indeed. An important thing to bear in mind when approaching Apollo is that his role in the ancient Greek pantheon was eclectic, even by contemporary standards, and the expansion of Greek culture to other parts of the Mediterranean only served to compound his identity even further. The story of Apollo is an excellent example of how stories and characters can change when they’re beloved across centuries, and it is for this reason that reading about the god is so enjoyable. Apollo: The Origins and History of the Greek God looks at the story of the Sun God and the various roles he played in Greek mythology. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about Apollo like never before.

Apollo: The Origins and History of the Greek God About Charles River Editors Introduction The Origins of Greek Mythology The Origins of Apollo How the Memory of Myth Shaped Depiction of Apollo Regicide in the Great Year Unlucky in Love? Apollo’s Different Roles Conclusion Online Resources Bibliography Free Books by Charles River Editors Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

The Origins of Greek Mythology “The Titanomachy symbolises the victory of Order over Chaos.” - Niall Livingstone[4] “The Greek word Mythos can indicate, amongst other things, a public utterance expressing the authority of its speaker.”[5] In fact, by the Classical Period, myths were principally instructive, hence Plato’s dim view of these stories being in the hands of anyone but philosophers. Myths helped crystallize beliefs and fashion a means of observing and categorizing patterns in daily life. According to Hesiod, the "Pre-World" was populated by personifications;[6] he painted the picture of the primordial geography of his worldview by dramatizing the personification of those elements he considered primal. This is a perfectly arbitrary folkloric trope, but in the case of the ancient Greeks, the antagonism was infused with strains of uncomfortable duality. Hesiod’s intention was to glorify Zeus, but in doing so, he created a melodrama that would last the ages.

Marie-Lan Nguyen’s picture of a bust of Plato The "Chasm" mentioned by Hesiod is a synonym for the ancient Greek word for Chaos, and "Earth" is the mighty mother-goddess Gaia, in whom

was located the hellish Tartara (or Tartarus), where the Titans would ultimately meet their fate. Interestingly, Hesiod also places Eros, the embodiment of erotic love, at the conception of the cosmos too, thus providing the ancient Greek readers with a foundation for procreation and the lasciviousness of all deities. As a result, the act of creation begins with Chaos, Gaia (Mother Earth), and Eros (Erotic love), but these are no quaint grandparental figures or benign personifications. Chaos was capable of "giving birth" to the most macabre, inherently bleak, and "chaotic" elements of the world, without the need for a reproductive partner.

An ancient Greek depiction of Gaia handing her newborn, Erichthonius, to Athena as Hephaestus watches Chaos spontaneously "bore" both Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night), whose offspring were suitably morbid and must be credited as such in order to lessen the blame on Pandora for "bringing all the sorrow into the world." The list of Nyx's offspring reads like a dreaded guest list of the worst attributes of humanity: the Fates, Death Spirits, Nemesis (Retribution), Apate (Deceit), Geras (Old Age), Eris (Strife), Ponus (Toil), Lethe (Forgetfulness), Limus (Famine), the Algaia (Sorrows), the Hysminae (Fights), the Machae (Battles), the Phonoi (Murders), the Androctasiae (Manslaughters), the Neicea (Quarrels), Pseudea Logoi (Lies) the Amphillogiae (Disputes), Dysnomia (Lawlessness), Ate (Delusion), and finally, as a frail light in the

darkness and the law that maintains it, Philotes (Friendship), and Horcus (Oath). It’s important to remember these bleak personifications are the inhabitants of the world into which the Titans would be born. From the very beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony, the reader is greeted with an array of reasons as to why "order" is to be honored and achieved at any cost. Seeing that Chaos had no need for her, Gaia had to become her own catalyst for the cosmos. Gaia "bore" Ouranos (Sky), whom Hesiod refers to as “Starry Heaven,” so that “he should cover her all about, to be a secure seat for ever for the blessed gods.” It wouldn’t be long, however, before said "Starry Heaven" had lost all connection with any "security" for the gods or otherwise. Gaia’s incestuous union with her firstborn son would become the most decisive act in the early stages of the Greek cosmological story, but it also set the scene for the discernible world in which the ancient Greeks lived, with a fertile Earth embraced by an all-encompassing Sky. Out of this visible union were born the "insatiably bellicose"[7] Hecatoncheires (the "Hundred-Handed Giants"), the Gigantes (the Giants), as well as the famous one-eyed Cyclopes, who were credited with building those very same "great walls of the palace of Mycenae." The most powerful, first generation beings, whose monstrous power would become pivotal to the war that was to come between the gods and the Titans, are credited with laying the bricks and mortar of this mystical prior power structure. This connection between a real human past and the deeds of the divine is indicative of Hesiod’s idea of a "Golden Age," in which humans and divine beings inhabited the same plane of existence and candidly interacted with each other. As this makes clear, even after two centuries of no significant building works, the crumbling walls of ancient palaces still had the power to awe and inspire theories of a divine past.

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s depiction of Polyphemus Unlike the first generation of Ouranos and Gaia's offspring‒not to mention those who simply materialized out of Chaos‒the Titans had more ambiguous roles in early mythology. As Kerényi noted, “These titans are a mysterious group; to suggest that they were originally nature-gods is almost meaningless, and the truth is that we have no idea where most of them come from.”[8] Unlike their forebears, Hesiod gives the Titans very few ostensibly "personified" names but instead gives them more rounded personalities. Here, the reader can begin to see a progression from chaos to order with every succession of power: Bedded with Heaven (Ouranos), Gaia bore deep-swirling Oceanus, Koios and Kreios and Hyperion and Iapetos, Thea and Rhea and Themis and Mnemosyne (Memory), Phoebe of gold diadem, and lovely Tethys. After them the youngest was born, crooked schemer Chronos, most fearsome of children, who loathed his lusty father.[9] This is Hesiod’s first account of the names of the first 12 Titans. "Deep-swirling Oceanus" refers to the enormous river the Greeks believed encircled their world. Mnemosyne, the Titan of "Memory," would go on to sleep with her nephew, Zeus, and give birth to the famous Muses, those favorites of the poets who inspired Hesiod to write his account. Aside from these two Titans, the names are not personifications, but individualistic. Rather than represent any ubiquitous force or element, their

own characters and actions take hold of the story, and the reader is ushered into a new epoch of protagonists and antagonists, especially when it comes to that "crooked schemer," Chronos.

A Roman mosaic depicting Ouranos and Gaia Hesiod refers to the Titans as "chthonic." They were "born of the Earth," and their subsequent "imprisonment" within her defines them even further. Ouranos hated his children, and once born, he forced Gaia to place them back inside her and guard them there indefinitely. Ouranos had no intention of curbing his lust for Gaia‒no doubt caused by his primordial uncle Eros‒and he "enveloped" her even while she was pregnant, though he would not allow "nature" to come to pass afterward. It’s here, in Hesiod’s Theogony, that the reader gets the first glimpse of an aberration of nature, with a wicked father overpowering a divine mother. To Ouranos, all those that were born of Earth and Heaven were the most fearsome of children, and their own father loathed them from the beginning. As soon as each of them was born, he hid them all away in a cavern of Earth, and would not let them into the light. He took pleasure in the wicked work, while the huge Earth was tight-pressed inside, and groaned. Finally, she thought up a nasty trick. Without delay, she created the element of grey

adamant, made a great reaping hook, and showed it to her dear children and spoke to give them courage, sore at heart as she was: “Children of mine and of an evil father, I wonder whether you would like to do as I say? We could get redress for your father’s cruelty. After all, he began it by his ugly behaviour.”[10] This appeal to the Titans to avenge the injustices brought upon them by their wicked father would be echoed by their own offspring, and the "call to arms" would come to symbolize the transition of one power system to another, according to a "natural law of behavior" (since it was the ugliness of Ouranos’s behavior that would lead to his downfall). Here, the reader is faced with another common mythological trope: that of creating a tool for one purpose, only to have it used by another, somewhat contradictory purpose later on. In order to usurp their wicked father, Chronos would use a new element specifically created for the purpose: Adamant. This element would become the metal of choice for the weapons the gods would later wield in their revolt against their own wicked father, the original "adamant-wielder," Chronos. The demise of Ouranos would not only liberate Gaia and the Titans, but would also result in the creation of yet more players in this primordial divine theater. After Gaia handed Chronos the adamant sickle and explained to him the "stratagem," the defining moment of separation took place: “Great Heaven came, bringing on the night and, desirous of love, he spread himself over Earth, stretched out in every direction. His son reached out from the ambush with his left hand…with his right he took the huge sickle with its long row of sharp teeth and quickly cut off his father’s genitals, and flung them behind him to fly where they might.”[11] The Sky was cleaved from Mother Earth, and both she and the Titans were liberated from tyranny. From the conservatively described "drops of blood" were born the Giants “in gleaming armour with long spears in their hands,” the nymphs who would occupy the woods and forests of the world and the Erinyes, the so-called "Furies" who would hunt down and punish those perpetrators of the most heinous crimes known to humankind. After he cut off their genitals, Chronos threw them into the sea, where they floated in a "white foam." Out of this foam‒or "Aphros" in ancient Greek‒sprang forth

the first goddess. Just as Eros had been present at the establishment of the first power system, Aphrodite, the more elaborate representative of love and desire, would be present to usher in the next.

Sandro Boticelli’s painting of the birth of Aphrodite

Peter Paul Rubens’ picture of Chronos devouring one of his children Liberated from their manumission and in the presence of Aphrodite, there came a new surge in reproduction amongst the Titans. A plethora of new deities, rivers, nymphs, and monsters appeared and assumed their roles in the new cosmos, governed by the sons and daughters of that wicked Ouranos. As mentioned earlier, their offspring wasn’t inherently wicked, as they included such beings as Helios (the Sun), the Horae (the Seasons), and thousands of wood and sea nymphs. This is worth bearing in mind when considering the role of the Titans as antagonists later on. After a lengthy description of the unions of the Titans and the fruit they bore, Hesiod turns to the moment where Rhea, “surrendering to (her brother) Chronos, bore resplendent children:” “Hestia, Demeter, and gold-sandaled Hera, mighty Hades who lives under the earth, merciless of heart, and [Poseidon,] the booming Shaker of Earth, and Zeus the resourceful, father of gods and men, under whose thunder the broad earth is shaken.”[12] In typical fashion, Chronos learned from Gaia and Ouranos that it was fated for him to be defeated by his own child (Hesiod doesn’t explain when his castrated father gave him this proclamation). Having learned something from his father‒namely that Gaia couldn’t be trusted to imprison her offspring and they would eventually have to be set free upon the world‒Chronos decided to devour his children as they were born. In her suffering, Rhea appealed to her parents‒Gaia and Ouranos‒for a stratagem to save her children from this fate. Gaia told her to go to a town called Lyktos in Crete to give birth. When she did, Gaia accepted the youngest god, Zeus, into a mountain on that fateful island and wrapped a stone in "babycloth" to give to his voracious father in lieu of the child. Chronos swallowed the stone without so much as a sneaking suspicion he was about to be overthrown, like his father had been before him.

An illustration depicting Rhea giving the stone to Chronos Chronos regurgitated each god in reverse order, the stone coming first and falling at Delphi, where it was venerated thenceforth. With this "re-birth" of the gods, the scene was set for a cataclysmic confrontation and an apocalyptic power struggle. Vengeance had to be exacted for the rape of their mother and their own imprisonment. The first twelve Titans had given birth to most of the ubiquitous elements of the cosmos. Not only did this create the backdrop for a new order of rule, but it was also the fertile ground from which all stories‒mythological and factual‒could grow and be imbued with meaning, according to the cosmological order. The "Titanomachy"‒the war wreaked upon the Titans‒was a defining moment in the evolution of Greek mythological thought. It was the moment where the Greeks developed a “greater self-awareness of their own social life and thought”[13] in the face of the "barbaric other," and it was so much more than a fight of "good versus evil," as is often thought to be the case. The term "Titanomachy" is a compound word, incorporating "Titan" and the Greek word "Machia," meaning "fight" or "battle." Just like the Amazonomachy (battle against the fearsome Amazons) and the

Centauromachy (battle against the Centaurs), the Titanomachy was depicted in the metopes of the Parthenon in Athens. The scenes selected for the metopes were those depicting quintessential "battles against the other." The Parthenon was a monument erected in the wake of the Persian Wars, the biggest, most cataclysmic invasion the Greeks had suffered in 700 years. Although this was a fight against "the other," it was a defining moment in ancient Greek history and of the mind-set of that peculiar collective. Their relatively young power systems had faced seemingly insurmountable odds against an older kingdom and had survived victorious, quashing chaos and constructing order from the rubble.

Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s “The Fall of the Titans”

Joachim Wtewael’s “The Battle Between the Gods and the Titans”

A depiction of Zeus launching a thunderbolt on the Temple of Artemis at Corfu Although the epic poets Homer and Hesiod “attributed to the divine powers everything that is harmful and blameworthy in men: stealing, committing adultery and deceiving one another,”[14] the Titans were depicted as something worse, embodying the rule of disorder and hubris. Although the gods were fallible and innately "human" in their vices, they were ultimately progressive. The Titans were "chthonic," representing "Nature" in the battle against the more "cultured"‒and certainly, more elaborate‒personalities of

the Olympian gods, who in this episode, are representative of order and culture. Ultimately, the Titanomachy is a classic story of the revolt[15] of the new against the old, culture against nature, and order against chaos. It is a story indicative of a people who have undergone multiple power struggles and states of unrest. As is the case with most cultures, the ancient Greeks defined their contemporary state of existence by the series of "boundary catastrophes" that had preceded it.[16] For that reason, the Titanomachy wasn’t just another piece of "art as propaganda," but instead a defining moment in ancient Greek culture. The Origins of Apollo Despite the fact that Apollo is easily one of the best known of the ancient Greek gods, the events surrounding his birth are often overshadowed by the strength of his character presented in later myths and his subsequent ubiquity in the modern collective understanding of Greek mythology. This isn’t altogether surprising when the modern reader is awash with other, more fantastic births (like Athena springing fully-grown and armored from Zeus’s head after he had swallowed the embodiment of “cunning,” for example), and given that Apollo is often presented to the modern reader simply as the definitive embodiment of the Sun, with all of the pervasive stolidity to be expected in such an elemental character. However, Apollo’s early life holds within it kernels of information that are not only pivotal to understanding his character; they would also go on to shape ancient Greek and modern thought in surprising ways. Apollo was the son of Zeus and the Titan Leto. Leto was a secondgeneration Titan, born to Coeus (“Celestial Axis”) and Phoebe (“Bright Shiner”). Based on the limited remaining sources on her life before motherhood, she doesn’t seem to have taken any part in the war between Zeus, the gods, and her grandfather Chronos. Very little is known about the earliest incarnations of Leto in general, other than that she was coy about who saw her true beauty and went to great lengths to ensure it remained a secret. After Zeus had fulfilled the prophecy of his patricide and subsequent rule, he distanced himself from his previous, more bellicose modus operandi in

favor of a more amorous existence, much to his long-suffering wife Hera’s chagrin. His omniscient gaze eventually found Leto and his clandestine intentions resulted in her becoming pregnant with twins. Hera found out about Leto’s liaison with her husband, and caused all the known lands to expel the titaness from them in the hope of stopping her from giving birth. In her desperate search, Leto was beleaguered by many chthonic beasts and monsters, including the dragon Python who lived near the oracular centre of Delphi and whom she was barely able to fend off from ravaging her. Eventually, Leto found the floating island of Delos and thwarted Hera’s plans when she gave birth first to Artemis, who instantly acted as midwife to her brother Apollo on “land that was not land.”

Attic pottery depicting Apollo and Artemis When he was merely four days old, Apollo was already able to call on his father to provide him with a bow and arrows. This Zeus did, commissioning them from Hephaestus, and once Apollo had them in his possession, he left Delos, promising to always offer his benevolence to the inhabitants of the island that gave his mother sanctuary to give birth. After leaving Delos, he immediately set about avenging the mistreatment his mother suffered at the hands of the beasts on the Greek mainland. He arrived at Mount Parnassus and found Python prowling its heights. Apollo drew his bow and wounded

the dragon, but failed to kill it. Python sought sanctuary at the “Oracle of the Mother” at Delphi, but no amount of received piety could dissuade the elevated ire of the young god, who followed the beast into the shrine and slew it beside the sacred crack in the earth from which whirled the prophetic smoke from the depths.

Patar Knight’s photo of the remains of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi If this had been the story of a great hero, then it’s likely that this episode would have evolved into a simple task or “labour” contributing to the formation of his heroism. However, no matter how ‘young’ he was, Apollo was a god fighting against a chthonic monster with a patroness who would not forgive so lightly. Mother Earth (Gaia) was the primordial mother of the Titans, and she was outraged by this treatment of her favorite beast at the hands of an impetuous and aweless child. She demanded retribution, and she called on Zeus to exact it. Zeus heeded Gaia’s complaints, but he didn’t avenge Python with the wrath Gaia had hoped for. Instead, he ordered Apollo to visit the city of Tempe in northern Thessaly, where he could be purified of his sins against Mother Earth. With his mother’s aggressor dead, however, Apollo cared neither for Gaia’s grievances nor for his father’s orders, and he instead traveled to Aigialeia in Achaea with his sister Artemis. He soon tired of that place, but he continued his travels in the face of his father’s ire and eventually arrived at Tarrha in Crete, where he allowed the local King Carmanor to perform the

purification ceremony on him. Purified, Apollo returned to Greece. He traveled to Arcadia in search of the lascivious nature-god Pan and, once he had found him, forced the goat-legged libertine to reveal the secrets of prophecy to him. With this hallowed lore in his possession, Apollo returned to Delphi and took it for his own. He reinstated an oracle there, but perhaps to appease the Earth goddess, kept the local priestesses (Pythonesses) as his divine retinue. The ancient sources are unclear about how “old” Apollo was when he performed these feats and traveled to both Crete and Arcadia, but the universal consensus is that he was surprisingly young, even for a god. Defeating the dragon Python and wresting the secrets of prophecy out of the hands of the illusive Pan would shape the character, celestial domain, and worship of the newly named Pythian Apollo for millennia.

Apollo Victorious over the Python by Pietro Francavilla

How the Memory of Myth Shaped Depiction of Apollo

A 17th century bust depicting Apollo The great French mythologist Jean-Pierre Vernant once wrote an essay called the “Mythic Aspects of Memory,” in which he sought to understand the function of myth in the formation of a collective memory of the past, often undocumented events of the ancient Greeks. He said that the “documentary evidence that [served] as the basis for this study concerns the deification of memory and the elaboration of a vast mythology concerning remembrance in archaic Greece. At issue here are religious representations. They are not at all gratuitous. I believe they are directly concerned with the history of memory.”[17] For the ancient Greeks, “Memory” (Mnemosyne) was a Titaness and mother of the Muses, who were credited with the inspiration to record real, historical events via the popular aesthetic of mythological stories. Robert Graves saw Greek mythology in much the same way as Vernant in this respect. The footnotes to Graves’s seminal The Greek Myths are replete with archaeological and philological evidence equating these stories to real-

life events in the history and prehistory of ancient Greece. The story of Apollo’s early life — up to his return to Delphi as its patron, especially — is particularly replete with these kernels of history. For example, the story of Python’s pursuit of Leto while she was trying to find a place to give birth would find its home in an unusual place in ancient Greek thought. Unlike many modern religious people, the ancient Greeks employed a curious acceptance of other, supposedly ‘foreign’ gods. This should not be confused with “reverence” per se, but there certainly was a level of respect held by the ancient Greeks for the gods of other people. Herodotus, the so-called “Father of History” (writing in the 5th century BCE) was an unabashed lover of “barbaric” legends, recording one such description of “foreign gods” that reveals how the ancient Greeks responded when confronted with the beliefs and rituals of a foreign god: “As to the customs of the Persians, I know them to be these. It is not their custom to make and set up statues and temples and altars, but those who do such things they think foolish, because, I suppose, they have never believed the gods to be like men, as the Greeks do; but they call the whole circuit of heaven Zeus, and to him they sacrifice on the highest peaks of the mountains; they sacrifice also to the sun and moon and earth and fire and water and winds. From the beginning, these are the only gods to whom they have ever sacrificed; they learned later to sacrifice to the “heavenly” Aphrodite from the Assyrians and Arabians. She is called by the Assyrians Mylitta, by the Arabians Alilat, by the Persians Mitra. “And this is their method of sacrifice to the aforesaid gods: when about to sacrifice, they do not build altars or kindle fire, employ libations, or music, or fillets, or barley meal: when a man wishes to sacrifice to one of the gods, he leads a beast to an open space and then, wearing a wreath on his tiara, of myrtle usually, calls on the god. To pray for blessings for himself alone is not lawful for the sacrificer; rather, he prays that the king and all the Persians be well; for he reckons himself among them. He then cuts the victim limb from limb into portions, and, after boiling the flesh, spreads the softest grass, trefoil usually, and places all of it on this. When he has so arranged it, a Magus comes near and chants over it the song of

the birth of the gods, as the Persian tradition relates it; for no sacrifice can be offered without a Magus. Then after a little while the sacrificer carries away the flesh and uses it as he pleases.”[18]

An ancient bust of Herodotus Herodotus was describing Persian practices as almost the mirror image of those of contemporary Greeks. The gods appear different, but they are, to Herodotus at least, simply different names to the ones the Greeks commonly used. Often the ancient Greeks wouldn’t so much contrast foreign gods with their own but instead try to equate them with those of their own pantheon. For instance, as well as the many forms of Aphrodite mentioned by Herodotus above, the Phoenician god Melqart was recognized by the Greeks as the foreign embodiment of their own Herakles. In fact, Melqart came to be known to the Greeks as “Tyrian Herakles” after the Phoenician capital of Tyre, where his cult was especially prevalent. Apollo’s foreignness is further exemplified in his favor for the mystical Hyperborean people, “Those Who Live Beyond The North Wind.” According to the story, after slaying Python and giving his father the cold shoulder, Apollo regularly traveled to live amongst these mystical northerners and, whilst among them, he took to sacrificing hecatombs (sacrifices of 100 or more animals at a time) of asses. When the ancient Greeks came into contact

with the ancient Egyptians and learned of their mythology, they instantly saw their figure of Apollo in Horus, whose victory over his father’s killer Set (equated to Typhon/Python) was celebrated every year by driving wild asses over a precipice. Both the Hyperboreans and the Egyptians seemed to embody ‘foreignness’ and ‘antiquity’ (especially the Egyptians, in this case) in the eyes of the ancient Greeks. Apollo’s apparent presence in the ritual practices of these peoples seemed to reinforce the story of his early adventures and foreign travels, as well as his ubiquity as one of the greater gods. This kind of cultural overlapping and assimilation can understandably cause headaches for the modern reader, but it’s important to realize that Greek authors such as Herodotus tended to use this assimilation as a means of understanding their world. It was easier to incorporate foreign cultures into a common narrative than to be faced with a completely alien set of beliefs and practices and not know how to consolidate them. That assimilation often didn’t need much evidence to take hold. Apollo became connected with Horus as Python was connected with Horus’s bestial adversary Set. The ambiguity of ancient characters is evident in the names of Python and Typhon, which were rather interchangeable in early times, according to Graves and as the modern reader can see well in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. In this 7th century BCE poem, Homer (or “pseudo-Homer,” since the existence of this single writer cannot be established even for the epic poems attributed to him) captured Apollo’s early volatility with clarity. This passage begins with Hera being furious at her husband Zeus for yet another instance of infidelity: “And thereafter [Hera] never came to the bed of wise Zeus for a full year … But when the months and days were fulfilled and the seasons duly came on as the earth moved round, she bore one neither like the gods nor mortal men, fell, cruel Typhaon, to be a plague to men. Straightway large-eyed queenly Hera took him and bringing one evil thing to another such, gave him to the dragoness; and she received him. And this Typhon [Python] used to work great mischief among the famous tribes of men. Whosoever met the dragoness, the day of doom would sweep him away, until the lord Apollo, who deals death from afar, shot a strong arrow at her. Then

she, rent with bitter pangs, lay drawing great gasps for breath and rolling about that place. [360] An awful noise swelled up unspeakable as she writhed continually this way and that amid the wood: and so she left her life, breathing it forth in blood. Then Phoebus Apollo boasted over her: ‘Now rot here upon the soil that feeds man' You at least shall live no more to be a fell bane to men who eat the fruit of the all-nourishing earth, and who will bring hither perfect hecatombs. Against cruel death neither Typhoeus shall avail you nor ill-famed Chimera, but here shall the Earth and shining Hyperion make you rot.’ “Thus said Phoebus, exulting over her: and darkness covered her eyes. And the holy strength of Helios made her rot away there; wherefore the place is now called Pytho, and men call the lord Apollo by another name, Pythian; because on that spot the power of piercing Helios made the monster rot away.”[19] At this time, Apollo was young, impetuous, headstrong, and vengeful, qualities that translate well to some of the historical events that took place in the area of Delphi in Archaic Greece. Python was created by Hera and sent to Delphi to spite her lascivious husband. Graves equates Hera, in this episode, to the prophetic Earth goddess who was worshipped in central Greece and the Peloponnese (later known as Gaia). When Apollo “dealt death form afar” to her sacred Python and occupied the oracular shrine at Delphi, he did so in the guise of “certain Northern Hellenes allied with Thraco-Libyans,”[20] who did indeed invade central Greece and the Peloponnese at some point in the Archaic Period (ca. 8th century - 5th century BCE). They also killed a sacred oracular serpent that was kept in the modest shrine there. There is evidence to suspect that the invading Thraco-Libyans took over this oracular shrine in the name of their own Canaanite god of healing (Smintheus)[21]. However, their alliance with the northern Hellenes meant that this “invading god” started to adopt the hints and hues of the different cultures it came into contact with, resulting in an increasingly complex character with links to the Canaanites, the mystical Hyperborean Horus, and the vanquished oracular snake deity at Delphi. The invaders appear to have agreed to maintain the previous occupants’ priestesses (known as Pythonesses), institute the regular “Pythian Games” at the site in honour of a

dead hero also known as “Python,” and to incorporate “Smintheus” as an epithet of Apollo.

Klaus-Peter Simon’s picture of the Temple of Apollo Smintheus at Çanakkale, Turkey Delphi was known as the “navel” (omphalos) of the world, but there was more to this term than merely metaphor. Evidently, the omphalos was traditionally a stone tomb of the dead hero Python, whose soul became incarnate in the oracular serpent. The dead were credited with being able to bring forth prophecies if given the means to do so — just consider Odysseus’s conversations with the dead in Book 11 of The Odyssey. The Pythoness would have sat atop this omphalos tomb and pronounced the oracles the serpent/hero gave her with the use of the sacred fumes emanating from beneath her feet. The invasion from the north, however, disrupted this sacred and ancestral function, as Graves noted: “The Hellenic (invading) priest of Apollo usurped the functions of the sacred king who, legitimately and ceremonially, had always killed his predecessor … Every ninth year a hut representing a king’s dwelling was built on the threshing floor at Delphi and a night attack suddenly made on it. The table of first-fruits was overturned, the hut set on fire, and the torch men fled from the sanctuary without looking behind them. Afterwards the youth who had taken part in the deed went…for purification, whence he returned in triumph, crowned and carrying a laurel branch.”[22] Initially, the modern reader is no doubt reminded of the mythical episode

involving purification, ordered by Zeus at Tempe, along with Apollo’s “triumphant return.” However, the involvement, even at a symbolic level, of regicide was often a difficult religious function to digest, though this was actually much more common than most people today imagine.

A picture of the omphalos at the museum in Delphi Regicide in the Great Year In many Indo-European cultures, every 9th year was considered the “Great Year,” a time of renewal and replenishment of unspoken but understood “energies.” Very often this “renewal” involved, at very least, a symbolic eradication of old powers for something transitional and new. In his seminal work “The Hero of a Thousand Faces,” Joseph Campbell described the importance of this transitional phase to both the religious psyche and subsequent societal health. “For the mythological hero is the champion of not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo: Holdfast, the keeper of the past. From obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is great and conspicuous in the

seat of power; he is enemy, dragon, tyrant, because he turns to his own advantage the authority of his position.”[23] This mentality is at the heart of the generational patricide/regicide in ancient Greek myth. Chronos slew his father Uranos, and Zeus followed in his father’s footsteps when he became the new king after Chronos. The transition of power was, and is, a cataclysmic event in the collective mind set. In ancient times, events were recorded in terms of taking place during periods of political office. Rather than saying an event took place in 425 BCE, for example, the ancient Greeks would say that it took place “in the Archonship of X.” The Romans had the same practice, electing two “Consuls” whose period in office was one year and whose names “defined” everything that happened during that year. Had Apollo avoided the purification ceremony, as he did at Tempe, then his act of sacrilege against his father would have no doubt incurred some kind of divine wrath. But since Apollo did agree to the purification ceremony (albeit on the headstrong young god’s own terms and not those of his father), he was able to swallow his pride and open himself up to receiving the wisdom of prophecy from Pan, ensuring his prominence as a god of prophecy. By returning to the seat of power at Delphi, Apollo resolved the status quo within himself, with his father, and within society at large whilst being remembered as the god under whose “rule” all of these historical events took place. The concentration of these varying facets of myth imbued Apollo with the elevated position of power he was henceforth credited with. Before his resolution of the status quo, Apollo was a quintessentially vengeful adolescent. Possibly the best example of Apollo’s earlier nature comes in the tale of Marsyas. Marsyas was a satyr from Phrygia who was unfortunate enough to fall foul of one of the many curses tossed aside flippantly by the ancient Greek gods: “Minerva [Athene] is said to have been the first to make pipes from deer bones and to have come to the banquet of the gods to play. Juno [Hera] and Venus [Aphrodite] made fun of her because she was grey-eyed and puffed out her cheeks, so when mocked in her playing and called ugly she came to the forest of Ida to a spring, as she played she viewed herself in the water, and saw that she was rightly mocked. Because of this she threw away the pipes

and vowed that whoever picked them up would be punished severely. “Marsyas, a shepherd, son of Oeagrus, one of the satyrs, found them, and by practicing assiduously kept making sweeter sounds day by day, so that he challenged Apollo to play the lyre in a contest with him. When Apollo came there, they took the Muses as judges. Marsyas was departing as victor when Apollo turned his lyre upside down, and played the same tune – a thing which Marsyas couldn’t do with the pipes. And so Apollo defeated Marsyas, bound him to a tree, and turned him over to a Scythian who stripped his skin off him limb by limb. He gave the rest of his body for burial to his pupil Olympus. From his blood the river Marsyas took its name.”[24] Robert Graves aligns the brutality of Apollo’s treatment of Marsyas with two connected historical events. First, Apollo’s adventures in Arcadia with Pan and in Phrygia with Marsyas are the latent memories of actual military and/or cultural invasions. The dominant Hellenes moved out of central Greece into more rural areas, such as the two in these episodes, and started to replace local customs with their own. For example, there was the apparent substitution of wind instruments for string instruments, which — aside from being more complex instruments to make and tune — had the “religious backing” of the goddess Athena, at least.[25] The second significance of this episode is the method of Marsyas’s demise. It’s likely that Apollo’s actions in Phrygia represent the actual ritualized flaying of an incumbent king on the occasion of his replacement, similar to what was once a generational tradition at Delphi in “The Great Year.”[26] Unlucky in Love? Unlike many of the male deities (including the lame Hephaestus, whose marriage was far from a happy one), Apollo remained the eternally youthful bachelor. From the literary record, however, it isn’t certain whether this was actually a matter of choice in Apollo’s circumstances or that he was simply very unlucky. Whatever the case, Apollo chose never to marry but instead satiated his sexual appetite with a slew of nymphs and dryads. In fact, his mythological liaisons with them drew upon the Greeks’

collective memory too. His involvement with these characters often founded the bases of the rituals either adopted or suppressed by Apollo’s later cults, something that is not uncommon in ancient Greek myth. The myth of Theseus is positively laden with them, from the murder of Sciron (representing the ritualistic regicide at the Scirophoria festival) to the connection between Theseus’s hunt of the Crommyonian Sow with the suppression of local Earth goddess cults. The examples are numerous in myth, and Apollo’s story is no different. His seductions of both Aria and Dryope seem to suggest the suppression of the rituals of local cults by later cults of Apollo.[27] Dryope was a nymph whom Apollo seduced while she was tending her flocks on Mt. Oeta with her friends the Hamadryads. As usual, there was a son born to his union, who went on to build a temple to his father in the city he founded on Mt. Oeta. Dryope served at this temple as priestess until she was stolen away by the Hamadryads and replaced with a poplar tree, a tree held sacred by the later cult of Apollo. The story of Daphne and Leucippus is another example of myth giving birth to ritual. Hyginus is rather brief in his description of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, the mountain nymph, but his description nevertheless reveals certain fascinating memories: “When Apollo was pursuing the virgin Daphne, daughter of the river Peneus, she begged for protection from Earth [Gaia], who received her, and changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo broke a branch from it and placed it on his head.”[28] Graves mentions that Daphne was not only a mountain nymph but also another priestess of the Earth goddess whose worshippers Apollo’s early cultadepts appear to have been hunting down and persecuting. He says that Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne represents the capture of Tempe — further adding to this place’s importance to Apollo — where the mare-headed goddess Daphoene was worshipped by a group of orgiastic laurel-chewing women. After the cult was suppressed, the cult of Apollo adopted the use of the laurel, but curtailed its wider use, declaring it could only be chewed by the Pythoness, since it was originally part of the triumphant hero’s return from purification in Tempe. Pausanias gave a fuller account of the unfortunate Leucippus, who happened to share a passion for Daphne.

“I pass over the story current among the Syrians who live on the river Orontes, and give the account of the Arcadians and Eleans. Oenomaus, prince of Pisa, had a son Leucippus. Leucippus fell in love with Daphne, but despaired of winning her to be his wife by an open courtship, as she avoided all the male sex. The following trick occurred to him by which to get her. “Leucippus was growing his hair long for the river Alpheius. Braiding his hair as though he were a maiden, and putting on women's clothes, he came to Daphne and said that he was a daughter of Oenomaus, and would like to share her hunting. As he was thought to be a maiden, surpassed the other maidens in nobility of birth and skill in hunting, and was besides most assiduous in his attentions, he drew Daphne into a deep friendship. “The poets who sing of Apollo's love for Daphne make an addition to the tale; that Apollo became jealous of Leucippus because of his success in his love. Forthwith Daphne and the other maidens conceived a longing to swim in the Ladon, and stripped Leucippus in spite of his reluctance. Then, seeing that he was no maid, they killed him with their javelins and daggers.”[29] Although gruesome, this is in fact the tamer version of the myth, since Leucippus is torn limb from limb in other accounts. Furthermore, other versions of the myth have Apollo utilise his recently won powers of divination to learn of Leucippus’s trickery and inform the nymphs to insist they all bathe naked, at which point his ruse was discovered. The name ‘Leucippus’ is a variation on ‘White Horse,’ which was actually the name of the ‘sacred king’ of a local horse cult who, according to Graves, was torn to pieces annually by wild women that later bathed in the river to purify themselves of their regicidal actions.

Alves Gaspar’s picture of Apollo and Daphne by Bernini in the Galleria Borghese The myth of Hyacinthus evokes the memory of cult suppression while also providing a “Just So” story about the flower that bears his name. In the following excerpt from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, Apollo speaks with the messenger god Hermes about how Zephyr (the North Wind) grew jealous of his intentions towards the young Spartan boy and made it so their game of quoit took a tragic turn: “APOLLO “[Hyacinthus] was learning to throw the quoit, and I was throwing with him. I had just sent my quoit up into the air as usual, when jealous Zephyr (damned be he above all winds! he had long been in love with Hyacinth, though Hyacinth would have nothing to say to him)—Zephyr came blustering down from Taygetus, and dashed the quoit upon the child's head; blood flowed from the wound in streams, and in one moment all was over. My first

thought was of revenge; I lodged an arrow in Zephyr, and pursued his flight to the mountain. As for the child, I buried him at Amyclae, on the fatal spot; and from his blood I have caused a flower to spring up, sweetest, fairest of flowers, inscribed with letters of woe. Is my grief unreasonable? „HERMES “It is, Apollo. You knew that you had set your heart upon a mortal: grieve not then for his mortality.”[30] Hyacinth (or Narcissus) was originally a “Flower Hero” from Crete. During the Minoan Period (ca. 3650-1400 BCE), this cult flourished and was even adopted into the later Mycenaean culture (ca. 1600-1100) on the Greek mainland. The month “Hyacinthius” was adopted on many islands, such as Rhodes and Cos, and traveled as far as the city of Sparta. It was during the so-called Dorian invasion from the north that Apollo eventually usurped Hyacinthus’s exalted presence in Sparta and became one of the largest cults in the city.[31] Apollo’s Different Roles Ultimately it seems that Apollo was originally an invading god, and the replacement and assimilation of established local cults defines the episodes of his volatile adolescence. But regardless of whether the volatility of his mythological character was reined in by the narrative or simply by the course of time is uncertain, what is evident is the fact that Apollo had to grow up, so to speak. Apollo’s vengeful nature was only abated when he finally incurred the full wrath of his father Zeus. Asclepius was the son of Apollo to a mortal woman, Coronis, who learned the healing arts from his father (Paean, a common epithet of Apollo meaning “healer”) and subsequently became a god of medicine in his own right. It was when this son of Apollo brought Glaucus back from the dead, subsequently robbing Hades of a soul, that Zeus’s fears arose. “But Zeus, fearing that men might acquire the healing art from him and so come to the rescue of each other, smote him with a thunderbolt. Angry on that account, Apollo slew the Cyclopes who had fashioned the thunderbolt for Zeus. But Zeus would have hurled him to Tartarus; however, at the intercession of Latona [Leto] he ordered him to serve as a thrall to a man for

a year. So he went to Admetus, son of Pheres, at Pherae, and served him as a herdsman, and caused all the cows to drop twins.”[32] With his acquiescence to go into servitude, Apollo crossed over into the final stage of his life as a god. His volatile adolescence had come to an end, and a god worthy of worship throughout the known world was born. People traveled to him from as far as Western Europe, Asia, and North Africa to hear the prophesies of this reformed juvenile delinquent. So radical was his transformation that he was given credit for coining and propagating the eternal maxims that would come to embody what the Greeks considered the “Golden Mean.” This included “Nothing In Excess” and “Know Thyself,” which were the words every supplicant saw above them as they entered the temple to receive their prophecy. Epithets were widely used in ancient Greek religious thought. Zeus, for instance, could be the Zeus who represented the king’s divine right to rule, his elevated position over the rest of the populace, and his fundamental judicial correctness by adopting the epithet Basileus. However, he could also be the Zeus who guarded travelers and messengers and those supplicating the said king for protection or amnesty for a crime committed by adopting the epithet Soter. Zeus Basileus and Zeus Soter are at once the same god, but different aspects of that divine power. Zeus had many of these epithets, but Apollo’s are dizzying in number. In order to outline some of Apollo’s roles and the epithets that denoted them, it may help to present a clearer image of how the ancient Greeks perceived their gods. Thus, it is necessary for the modern reader to imagine the ancient Greek gods more as “divine powers” rather than exalted personalities. Not just that they had divine powers, but that they represented the cosmic powers of the universe that are always present and always in conflict. Vernant gives the example of the ancient Greeks connecting Zeus with the “Sky” while, at the same time, making a distinction between the two “areas” of sky. For the ancient Greeks, the sky was divided into the “constantly luminous” and brilliantly incorruptible Aether and the Aer, which is “the zone of atmospheric phenomena whose unpredictable violence is of the first importance in the life of men since it is the source of the winds, clouds, and beneficial rain, and also of destructive storms.”[33] Understanding this duplicity in relation to the king of all the gods makes it easier to

understand the multiplicity of characters in his pantheon. Each god had specific forms of knowledge — different areas of expertise, one might say — and the rivalry and conflict between the gods represents the volatility of fate and the cosmos as the ancient Greeks perceived it. The ancient Greeks “saw the divine cosmos torn by tensions, contradictions and conflicts of prerogatives and power,”[34] and the volatility Apollo exuded in his earlier stories, and which led to his many areas of expertise, would have seemed perfectly acceptable to a contemporary reader. The gods were ultimately capable of embodying any and all functions of the psyche and society. God of Medicine “So he spoke in prayer, and Phoebus Apollo heard him. Down from the peaks of Olympus he strode, angered at heart, bearing on his shoulders his bow and covered quiver. The arrows rattled on the shoulders of the angry god as he moved, and his coming was like the night. Then he sat down apart from the ships and let fly an arrow: terrible was the twang of the silver bow. The mules he assailed first and the swift dogs, but then on the men themselves he let fly his stinging shafts, and struck; and constantly the pyres of the dead burned thick.”[35] The above quotation comes from Homer’s Iliad and is a great example of Apollo’s duplicity as a “God of Health and Disease”. There he is seen striking down the Greeks for the impious actions of their commander Agamemnon; however, he is not striking them down with “arrows” in the conventional sense — those arrows are a “plague”. Apollo’s plague was not designed to punish an individual transgressor but, instead, to cause pain to a larger group of people who had the collective power to force change from said transgressor — in this case, the bellicose and proud commander of the Greek forces, Agamemnon. Apollo’s epithets cover such things as Acestor (“Healer”), Paean (also “Healer”), and Iatrus (“Physician”), as well as Parnopios/Parnopion (“Of the Locusts”) and Carneios. “The cult of Apollo Carneus has been established among all the Dorians ever since Carnus, an Acarnanian by birth, who was a seer of Apollo. When he was killed by Hippotes the son of Phylas, the wrath of Apollo fell upon the camp of the Dorians.”[36] Apollo’s wrath came in the form of another plague that fell on all of the Dorian people. This appears to have been a common tactic of Apollo; rather than striking down would-be transgressors with a

lightning bolt like his father, Apollo chose to inflict plagues of bodily or agricultural pestilence on the associates and countrymen of his victims. This duality in terms of healing and harming is actually quite easily explained. As it is today, the medicinal properties of pharmaceuticals could be both beneficial and fatal depending on the patient and the administration of the drug in antiquity. The word “pharmaceutical”, in fact, comes from the ancient Greek word “Pharmakos”, which could mean either “medicine” or “drug/poison”. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the “divine power” of medicine would embody this duality too. Apollo’s son soon became a hero and the god of medicine in his own right. Before his death at the hands of Zeus, Asclepius’s life harbored many of the most influential aspects of Greek mythology on modern-day culture. Hippocrates, whom modern medical physicians may thank for the Hippocratic Oath, was trained at the temple of Asclepius (the Asclepion) on his native island of Kos. In fact, the original Hippocratic Oath began by swearing “by Apollo the Physician and by Asclepius and by Hygieia [Health] and by Panacea [Universal Healer] and by all the gods …”[37]

Michael Maynert’s picture of an ancient statue of Asclepius Smintheus is another epithet attributed to Apollo, one that has its origin in the eastern land of Canaan. Smintheus likely had its root in the word “sminthos,” which was actually the ancient Greek word for mouse. Curiously, the Canaanite god of healing, Esmun, had a curative mouse as his emblem, so it is likely that this was an original intended meaning given by the invading Thraco-Lydians. However, there are some schools of thought that connect Apollo and the mouse motif because mice were considered a common source of disease and failed crops to the ancient Greeks and, in his capacity of a “healing god”, Apollo would have protected his worshippers from the evils brought about by this little rodent. Either way, Apollo’s aspect as a god of medicine was a prominent one in ancient Greek society, and it is worth bearing this in mind when reading any myths in which he appears, as it surely had a large influence on his actions in those narratives. God of Music and the Arts The wonderful story of Hermes is to thank for the mythological origins of Apollo as the god of music. Hermes was born to Maia atop Mount Cyllene, but no sooner had his mother laid him on a winnowing fan than he had grown into a small, mischievous boy dead set on trickery. He traveled to Pieria, where Apollo had been put in charge of the divine herd, and he mingled amongst them. As precocious as he was cunning, Hermes fixed the cattle so that they would leave confusing tracks for any would-be pursuer and then led them away to a secret cave. Apollo returned to his herd and was tricked by Hermes’s plan. He traveled east and west in search of the divine cattle and eventually offered a reward that enticed the satyrs to cover the rural areas of Greece in search of them. Eventually they came across a cave emanating the most beautiful music, muffled by its cunning player, and that had two beautiful hides stretched outside its mouth. The satyrs drew closer to the cave, and there they met the nymph Cyllene, who told them that a most gifted child had recently been born there — so gifted, in fact, that he had fashioned a new musical toy from a tortoise shell and some cow-gut. The satyrs knowingly inquired where the boy had got the cow-gut. Apollo soon found out about the success of the satyrs, and he arrived at the

cave ready to exact vengeance: “Now when the Son of Zeus and Maia saw Apollo in a rage about his cattle, he snuggled down in his fragrant swaddling-clothes; and as wood-ash covers over the deep embers of tree-stumps, so Hermes cuddled himself up when he saw the Far-Shooter [Apollo]. He squeezed head and hands and feet together in a small space, like a new born child seeking sweet sleep, though in truth he was wide awake, and he kept his lyre under his armpit. But the Son of Leto was aware and failed not to perceive the beautiful mountain-nymph and her dear son, albeit a little child and swathed so craftily … Then, after the Son of Leto had searched out the recesses of the great house, he spake to glorious Hermes: ‘Child, lying in the cradle, make haste and tell me of my cattle, or we two will soon fall out angrily. For I will take and cast you into dusky Tartarus and awful hopeless darkness, and neither your mother nor your father shall free you or bring you up again to the light, but you will wander under the earth and be the leader amongst little folk.’”[38] Hermes denied it. Then he denied the theft again to Zeus, after he had been brought there in his swaddling clothes. Zeus laughed at this baby, barely a day old, who had the audacity to lie to his own father and the king of the gods. Zeus took both Hermes and Apollo to the cave where the cows were and continued to question Hermes harshly. Eventually, Hermes gave in. Apollo, still furious with this cunning child, reminded Zeus that he hadn’t only stolen the divine cattle, he had killed two of them too. When Zeus asked the day-old baby how and why he did this, Hermes replied, “I did it with the strength of my own hands and I cut the two up into twelve equal pieces and sacrificed them to the twelve gods.” Until this time, the pantheon had been made up of only 11 gods, so Apollo was justified in his alarm. “Twelve?!” he asked the baby. “Who is the twelfth?” Hermes bowed to his father and the irate Apollo and said humbly, “Your servant, sir.” “Very easily he softened the son of all-glorious Leto as he would, stern though the Far-shooter was. He took the lyre upon his left arm and tried each string in turn with the key, so that at his touch it sounded awesomely. And Phoebus Apollo laughed for joy; for the sweet throb of the marvelous music went to his heart, and a soft

longing took hold on his soul as he listened. Then the son of Maia, harping sweetly upon his lyre, took courage and stood at the left hand of Phoebus Apollo; and soon, while he played shrilly on his lyre, he lifted up his voice and sang, and lovely was the sound of his voice that followed. He sang the story of the deathless gods and of the dark earth, how at the first they came to be, and how each one received his portion. First among the gods he honored Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses…to which Apollo replied, “Slayer of oxen, trickster, busy one, comrade of the feast, this song of yours is worth fifty cows, and I believe that presently we shall settle our quarrel peacefully. But come now, tell me this, resourceful son of Maia: has this marvellous thing been with you from your birth, or did some god or mortal man give it you —a noble gift —and teach you heavenly song? For wonderful is this new-uttered sound I hear, the like of which I vow that no man nor god dwelling on Olympus ever yet has known but you, O thievish son of Maia. What skill is this? What song for desperate cares? What way of song? For verily here are three things to hand all at once from which to choose, —mirth, and love, and sweet sleep. And though I am a follower of the Olympian Muses who love dances and the bright path of song —the full-toned chant and ravishing thrill of flutes —yet I never cared for any of those feats of skill at young men's revels, as I do now for this: I am filled with wonder, O son of Zeus, at your sweet playing.”[39] With that, Hermes gave Apollo the lyre he had made, and Apollo gave him the rule of the divine herd in turn. Delighted and equipped with the newest form of instrument, Apollo had become the god of music. “Though I am a follower of the Olympian Muses who love dances and the bright path of song … yet I never cared for any of those feats of skill at young men's revels, as I do now for this.” This quote is a remarkably important part of this story. At first glance, it would appear that Apollo had as much respect for the Muses as any other god until the moment he saw what music could be — what it could do. Henceforth, not only would Apollo become more than just a follower of the Muses, his devotion to them and their art would result in him acquiring the epithet “Mousagetes,” meaning “Leader of the Muses.” The Muses were the inspirations for more than just music. Although their number seemed to vary throughout the ages, by the Classical Period (ca. 5th -

4th century BCE) there were nine, and by the Hellenistic Period (323-146 BCE) they had adopted names akin to their devotion: Euterpe (flutes and lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and pastoral poetry), Calliope (epic poetry), Erato (love Poetry), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Clio (history), Urania (astronomy), Terpsichore (dance). As the leader of these Muses, Apollo adopted the role of patron of all arts, a role which itself has a curious origin. On the island where Apollo and Artemis were born lived a moon goddess who went by the name of Brizo (“Soother”) and became indistinguishable from Leto later on.[40] Graves goes on to identify Brizo with the Hyperborean triple goddess “Brigit,” who was the patroness of all the arts and was later Christianized as St. Brigit or St. Bride. The blending of Hyperborean, Greek, and Christian mythologies all contributed to the fractal compendium of Apollo’s character as it reached the modern reader. God of Prophecy Apollo’s epithet “Iatromantis” is an excellent example of the fractal nature of this god. “Iatro” comes from the word “Iatros,” which means “physician” and further denotes his role as the god of healing. Whereas “mantis” comes from the word for “prophet/magician” and is an epithet implying Apollo was the patron of more esoteric powers than healing and disease. Another “prophetic” epithet Apollo adopted was that of “Loxias”. This term is connected to the word “Legein” meaning “to speak,” but it has the added meaning of “ambiguous” in reference to the oddly, often deliberately worded prophecies the Pythoness uttered at Delphi. One of the most famous prophecies involved the unfortunate King Croesus. hen considering the role of the Delphic Oracle in the ancient Mediterranean, it is always useful to remember the distances people traveled to visit it. The respect held for both the Pythoness and Apollo is evident in those distances traveled as well as the huge amount of wealth dedicated to the shrines there. Croesus was the king of Lydia, which was the vast swathe of western Turkey stretching from the Black Sea and covering most of Anatolia. It was there that scholars believe coinage was first invented and, partially for that reason, Croesus is known today for his wealth, encapsulated in the idiom “as rich as Croesus.” He was a successful king and was considered one of the wealthiest

rulers of his day by contemporaries. Later in his reign, he considered attacking the quickly expanding Persian Empire before it reached and swallowed his kingdom. Naturally, greed was a factor in his desire to attack — what king doesn’t invariably aspire to increase the size of his kingdom? But Croesus had earned his money and power by way of his own intelligence, so he was naturally cautious of a large military undertaking. He appealed to several oracles around the Mediterranean, but landed on Delphi as the most accurate, and he offered up shocking amounts of wealth to the “Pythian God”, some of which were recorded as still being there by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. “When these offerings were ready, Croesus sent them to Delphi, with other gifts besides: namely, two very large bowls, one of gold and one of silver. The golden bowl stood to the right, the silver to the left of the temple entrance. These too were removed about the time of the temple's burning, and now the golden bowl, which weighs eight and a half talents and twelve minae, is in the treasury of the Clazomenians, and the silver bowl at the corner of the forecourt of the temple. This bowl holds six hundred nine-gallon measures: for the Delphians use it for a mixing-bowl at the feast of the Divine Appearance. It is said by the Delphians to be the work of Theodorus of Samos, and I agree with them, for it seems to me to be of no common workmanship. Moreover, Croesus sent four silver casks, which stand in the treasury of the Corinthians, and dedicated two sprinkling-vessels, one of gold, one of silver.”[41] This was a king from western Turkey dedicating an enormous amount of wealth to placate the distant “Pythian Apollo”, and he was not the only one. Any visitor to Delphi today will find themselves meandering up the serpentine path flanked by the many treasuries the various city-states erected to house the wealth they sent to the Oracle every year. “When the Lydians came to the places where they were sent, they presented the offerings, and inquired of the oracles, in these words: ‘Croesus, king of Lydia and other nations, believing that here are the only true places of divination among men, endows you with such gifts as your wisdom deserves. And now he asks you whether he is to send an army against the Persians, and whether he is to add an army of allies.’ Such was their inquiry; and the judgment given to Croesus by each of the two oracles was the same: namely, that if he should send an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire.”[42]

Croesus was delighted with this answer, but before he departed on a campaign against the Persians, he sent even more gifts with another request concerning the length of his rule: “When the Medes have a mule as king, Just then, tender-footed Lydian, by the stone-strewn Hermus flee and do not stay, and do not be ashamed to be a coward.”[43] Croesus felt confident that the Medes would never choose a mule to be their king, so he put his war preparations into effect. He marched on the Persians, but once he saw their forces, he decided to retreat to Sardis for the winter and await his allies from Egypt, Babylon, and Lacedaemonia. However, he underestimated the ambition of the new Persian King Cyrus, who didn’t acknowledge the fairly universal custom of retreating from the battlefield for the winter. Cyrus marched on Sardis, and Croesus soon learned that this king was of mixed birth — his father being Persian, his mother a Mede — and that the Oracle’s last reply had intended to describe Cyrus’s culturally diverse background. The Medes had, in fact, chosen a “mule” as their king and, furthermore, the great empire to fall after Croesus attacked was Croesus’s own. Croesus didn’t blame himself but instead acknowledged the mystifying and ambiguous power of the Pythian god “Apollo Loxias”. There are many examples of the Delphic Oracle’s confusing prophecies. Much like those of Nostradamus, the Pythian prophecies were often ambiguously worded statements that would only come true once their garbled meanings were attached to events after the fact. This didn’t affect their credibility in the eyes of the ancients, though; Apollo was a god and, therefore, unquestionable in his prophesies. If the receiver didn’t understand the prophecy they received, then the fault lay with the faulty understanding of the receiver, not the god. Moreover, there could be few complaints when the definition of “Apollon”, one of the most widely used spellings of Apollo, was “Destroyer”. God of the Sun Apollo’s association with the sun is possibly one of his most fascinating attributes because it is a surprisingly late addition to his multi-faceted personality. Nowadays, it is generally understood that the connection between Apollo and the sun was most strongly felt and emphasized during

the Hellenistic Period (323-146 BCE), with hardly any references to this connection in earlier literature.[44] In his excellent book Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins, Joseph Fontenrose says that he can find absolutely no references to the fact in any of the later Latin literature. So the modern reader — who has no doubt grown up believing, as the writer did, that Apollo was inextricably linked with the sun — could only be correct in stating so with the caveat ‘in the Hellenistic Period’. However, even in the Homeric writings, Apollo is often referred to as “Phoebus Apollo”. “Phoebus” being the masculine version of his grandmother’s name “Phoebe”, meaning “shiner/shining one”. Even from a cursory look at Apollo’s family tree, it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination that this “bright shining” Titan may have had some influence over Apollo’s “Phoebus” epithet, certainly since the “shining” quality was given to both Apollo and Artemis during the Hellenistic Period, due to their connection with the sun and the moon respectively. In fact, prior to the Hellenistic period, the sun actually took on a more subservient role to the moon in many cultures. Even as late as the Classical Period (ca. 5th - 4th century BCE), many of the cultural systems (ritual and agricultural) were governed by the movements of the moon, not the sun.[45] The moon is prominent in many early European myths — the role of the “Moon-Cow” in the formation of Crete, as well as the adventures of Theseus, to name just two — and Helios is treated as little more than the offspring of a Titan until much later on. There is a story in the Helios myth that has an interesting connection with the moon — Helios’s receiving as a gift the island of Rhodes from Zeus. Zeus gave Helios this island after he had forgotten to allocate him one while he was allocating islands and cities to the other gods. Rather than forcing Zeus to start over, Helios told him that he saw an island emerging from the sea near Asia Minor and he would be “well content with that one”. The real story of his patronage of Rhodes wasn’t so glib, however, since it was originally the dominion of the moon goddess Danaë until she was ‘expelled’ by the cult of the Hittite sun god Tesup.[46] The Rhodians became great sea traders during the Archaic Period (ca. 8th - 5th century BCE) and, for a while, were the only non-Egyptian traders officially recognized by the Pharaohs. This led to the Rhodians developing a strong connection with the city of

Heliopolis, which was the religious centre of the cult of Ra, the Egyptian god of the midday sun. Apollo and Egypt Egypt appears to be at the center of many of Apollo’s changing aspects, as can be seen in his connection with Horus. By the Hellenistic Period, Apollo’s links to Horus seem to be embedded in the contemporary culture, but there were some earlier references to this connection too. Writing in the 5th century BCE about a visit he made to Egypt, Herodotus wrote about a series of statues he was shown by the Egyptian priests by way of explaining to him that the Greeks were wrong in their belief that humans could be descended from gods: “Thus they showed that all those whose statues stood there had been good men, but quite unlike gods. Before these men, they said, the rulers of Egypt were gods, but none had been contemporary with the human priests. Of these gods one or another had in succession been supreme; the last of them to rule the country was Osiris' son Horus, whom the Greeks call Apollo; he deposed Typhon, and was the last divine king of Egypt.”[47] Although Herodotus doesn’t appear to share the convictions of the Egyptian priests, he, like many ancient Greeks, respected them very highly and, as can be seen here, tied their religious references to his own culture. He equated Horus with Apollo, but not without reason; aside from the ritualistic connections already mentioned, Horus was the Egyptian god of the sky, which, naturally, was considered to contain both the sun and the moon. According to the story recounted in “The Contendings of Horus and Seth” (ca. 12th century BCE), it was during the ongoing fight between Horus and Seth for the throne of Egypt that Horus was deprived of his eye(s) by his enemy. “Now as for Horus, he was lying under a shenusha-tree in the land of the oasis. Seth found him, seized hold of him, threw him down upon his back on the mountain, removed his two eyes from their sockets, and buried them on the mountain so as to illumine the earth. The two balls of his eyes became two bulbs which grew into lotuses. Seth came away and told Pre-Harakhti falsely: ‘I did not find Horus’ - although he had found him. Then Hathor, Mistress of the Southern Sycamore, set out, and

she found Horus lying weeping in the desert. She captured a gazelle and milked it. She said to Horus: ‘Open your eye(s) so that I may put this milk in them.’ Then he opened his eye(s) and she put the milk in them, putting some in the right one and putting some in the left one. She told him: ‘Open your eye(s).’"[48] The reader’s attention is drawn to the important ambiguity between the singular and plural in the above translation. Some versions of this myth have Seth gouge out both of Horus’s eyes, but many of them assert that it was just one eye — the left one, to be exact. The “Eye of Horus” has become one of the most universally recognized symbols of life and the sun, but this was only his right eye. Horus’s left eye — that which suffered at the hands of his enemy and subsequently changed colour after its extraction — was attributed to the moon.

The Eye of Horus It was the confluence of these three gods — Helios, Horus and Apollo — that contributed to the aspects of Apollo as a sun god. The prior subservience of the sun and Helios to the moon and her various mythological incarnations found its way to Heliopolis. This isn’t to say that the Rhodian mythology influenced that of the Egyptians, although if such a connection could be made, the author is unwilling to do so here. What is important here is that the connection between Horus and Helios was evident before the Hellenistic

Period when Apollo’s Egyptian connection took hold. By equating Horus to Apollo, the Hellenistic writers and readers could see a direct connection between Apollo, the sun, and the moon. Furthermore, the Hellenistic Period tended to intellectualize the figures of myth more than in previous eras and did so in a very vocal way. Prior to his connection with Apollo, Helios rarely appeared as anything more than a tertiary character in Greek myth. It was at the onset of this “intellectualization” of the deity, however, that Helios became practically assimilated by Apollo, to the extent that the more elaborate mythological figure adopted much of Helios’s symbolism and came to be known as the Greek sun god by many later generations. Conclusion The formation of Apollo’s myth is perhaps one of the most complex of the entire Greek pantheon. Naturally, it’s difficult to square the circle in many of the historical examples put forward by Graves when looking at the myths from the point of view of their aesthetic worth. However, it is important to remember that oral history throughout the world functions due to the beauty of either the story itself or the language utilized in its telling. The story of Apollo’s love for Hyacinth does not evoke images — certainly not in the modern reader’s mind — of military invasions from the north, but it is the same names that appear in the archaeological and philological record that make these curious and enlightening connections. History is the story of the winners, and it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine that, whispered around centuries of campfires, military campaigns might transmogrify into gripping stories of flayed satyrs. Apollo’s history seems to have the qualities of flypaper in respect to its amalgamation of mythological and historical attributes. His is the story of an ancient, deeply felt cosmic power that affected many aspects of both ancient and modern life. His is the story of the passage of time and the substitution of one religious system for another, and his is the story of how the ancient Greeks formulated an understanding of their cosmos after they came into contact with people who had what, at times, must have been shockingly different cosmological world views. The ancient Greeks came to see — whether through concerted effort or received analogy — these differences as variances in language and practice.

The Apollo known to the modern reader is very much one that was shaped over a long period of time. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, Apollo assimilated the aspects of many local Greek cults, but it wasn’t until the Hellenistic Period that the modern view of him really took hold. Egypt became a melting pot of a religious solar symbolism, out of which emerged the true “Phoebus Apollo” he is known as today. It was at this time that Apollo consolidated his fractal personality and matured as a deity, at least according to ancient believers. Indeed, Apollo’s story is very much a coming of age story — the transition from adolescence to manhood. During the early episodes of his story, Apollo is often violently rash and infuriatingly headstrong, two fairly typical characteristics of male youths. It was after he had (reluctantly) agreed to atone for his crimes against Gaia that he started to mature. It took the final, cataclysmic run-in with his father for Apollo to cease his wanderings and furtive relations with nymphs and dryads and take on the mantle of a respectable god — one that provided a service for humans in exchange for their worship. A fitting development in the story of Apollo is the connection between his later characteristics and his music. Apollo was considered the “Enemy of Barbarism” because of what he came to embody, at least by the Classical Period, when the Greeks were keen on providing a clear distinction between themselves and anybody who wasn’t Greek, and thus wasn’t civilized. Music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and science were seen as the intellectual pursuits that separated the cultured from the barbaric, and the symbol of Apollo’s embodiment of all things cultured was his seven-stringed lute. Said to be able to “charm the wildest beast” in the right hands, the lute came to be much more than a simple instrument. By the 1st century BCE, each of the seven strings came to be associated with a vowel in the Greek alphabet, which many contemporaries believed gave the music they created therapeutic benefits. This idea of music as therapy grew in popularity throughout the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, even taking hold in that “grandfather” of cultures Egypt, as described by the Alexandrian philosopher Demetrius: “In Egypt the priests sing hymns to the Gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession, the sound of which produces as strong a musical impression on their hearers as if the flute and lyre were used…”[49] This utterance of vowel sounds, whether by lengthened pipes, plucked strings, or solemn chanting, had a divine quality to it that enabled the priests

to speak with the gods and deeply affect mortals. It would seem, then, that Apollo’s lyre came to unite symbolically his aspects as God of Music and of Medicine. It became his most ostensible symbol even as early as the Classical Period. Cities with close relationships to Apollo, such as Thespiai and Kos, had coinage created with Apollo’s lyre on them by the late 2nd century BCE. But there was one city that carried the lyre on their silver drachma from the 6th century BCE, representing a more-than-usually close and ancient relationship with Apollo. It was, of course, the “floating land” of his birth: Delos. Online Resources Other books about ancient history by Charles River Editors Other books about ancient Greece by Charles River Editors Other books about Apollo on Amazon Bibliography Babbitt, F. C., [Translated] (1936) Plutarch. Moralia Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd Campbell, J. (2008) The Hero With A Thousand Faces University of Princeton Evelyn-White, H. G., [English Translation] (1914) The Homeric Hymns and Homerica Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. Farnell, L. R., (1921) Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality Oxford Clarendon Press Fontenrose, J., (1959) Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins Biblo & Tannen Publishers Fowler, H W and F G. Oxford [Translated] (1905) The Works of Lucian of Samosata The Clarendon Press Frazer, J. G. (1922) The Golden Bough Macmillan Grant, M., [Edited and Translated] (1960) The Myths of Hyginus University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies Lawrence: University of

Kansas Press Graves, R., 1955 The Greek Myths Penguin Godley, A. D., (1920) Herodotus’ Histories Cambridge Harvard University Press. Hall, J. M. (2006). "Dorians: Ancient Ethnic Group" In Wilson, N., G., Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece Psychology Press Hall, J. M., (2000). "Dorians and Heraklidai" in Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (first paperback ed.). Cambridge University Press Hall, J. M., (2000) Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (first paperback ed.). Cambridge University Press H. Hoffmann, 1963. "Helios", in Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt Mitchell-Boyask, R., (2008) Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History and the Cult of Asclepius Cambridge University Press Murray, A.T. [Translated] (1924) Homer’s The Iliad in two volumes Cambridge, MA Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. Nilsson, Martin. P., (2009) Primitive time-reckoning: A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples BiblioLife Pinch, G., (2004) Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press Simpson, W. K., (2003) The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry Yale University Press Wilson, N., G., (2006) Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. Psychology Press W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod (1918) Pausanias: Description of Greece in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London,

William Heinemann Ltd.

Free Books by Charles River Editors We have brand new titles available for free most days of the week. To see which of our titles are currently free, click on this link.

Discounted Books by Charles River Editors We have titles at a discount price of just 99 cents everyday. To see which of our titles are currently 99 cents, click on this link.

[1]

530ff Graves 1955 [3] Graves 1955 [4] 2011 [5] Livingstone 2011 [6] Dowden 2011 [7] Vernant 1996a [8] 1963 [9] Theogony Lines 133-138 [10] Theogony Lines 159-161 [11] Lines 170-187 [12] Lines 454-460 [13] 1984 [14] Vernant 1983 [15] Detienne 1981 [16] Breton Connelly 2014 [17] 2006 [18] Histories 1.131-132 [19] Hymn to Apollo 349ff [20] Graves 1955 [21] ibid. [22] 1955 [23] 2008 [24] Fabulae 165 [25] Graves 1955 [2]

[26]

Campbell 2008 p. 289 & Frazer 1922 p. 280 [27]

Graves 1955 Fabulae 203 [29] Description of Greece viii. 20 [30] Dialogues of the Gods 14 [31] See Hall 2006 for further information on the Dorian Invasion [28]

[32]

Biblioteca 3.10.4 ibid. [34] ibid. [35] Iliad 1.43 [36] Pausanias 3.13 [37] Farnell 1921 [38] Hymn to Hermes 235 [39] Hymn to Hermes 419ff [40] Graves 1955 [41] Histories 1.51 [42] Histories 1.53 [43] Histories 1.55 [44] Hoffman 1963 [45] Nilsson 2009 [46] Graves 1955 [47] Histories 2.144 [48] Simpson 2003 [49] On Style, see Graves 1955 [33]