APOLLON (or Apollo) Apollo is the god of light, not the sun. Helios (Sol in Roman myth) is the Greek god of the sun. It wasnt until 3rd century BC that Apollo became identified with the sun, and became known as Apollo Helios. God of prophecy and healing, often called Phoebus, perhaps meaning Shiner, is one of the most important Greek gods; he is also by far the most complex and difficult to understand. In many stories he is inseparable from ARTEMIS (the Roman Diana), goddess of wild animals and the hunt, whose cult shows signs of reaching back into the Paleolithic Period, when hunting was a principal source of food. In still other myths, Artemis acts independently and achieves an identity of her own. With their mother, LETO (a Titaness), they form a sort of divine family, although in origin they had nothing to do with one another. Leto is evidently an ancient mother goddess (an easy explanation) and was worshiped as such in Lycia and perhaps on Crete, but in Greek myth she is simply the mother of the divine twins, who are ever ready to defend her honor. Apollo fulfills in the divine community the same function as the oral poet in the human, playing for choral dance and singing and entertaining at the banquet. Thus he was called Musagetes, leader of the Muses, the spirits who enable the oral poet Apollo was the sun of Zeus and Leto and the twin of Artemis (Diana in Roman mythology). He was born under a palm tree on the Aegean island of Delos, which became a major centre of Apollos cult worshippers. He had the gift of prophecy and his central temple was the oracle at Delphi where people could seek advice and prophecies from his high priestess, the Sybil. Apollo also is known as Pythian because he killed a giant python snake which had terrorized Delphi. Apollos arrows were said to cause illness and yet at the same time he was revered as a healer. His son Asclepius was the main Greek god of medicine. He was also a god of poetry, music and is frequently shown with a lyre and the nine Muses. He was also known as Phoebus (Shining One) because of his role as the god of light. Apollo had many lovers, male and female. Apollos most famous love story is the pursuit of the nymph Daphne. Eros (Cupid) wanted revenge for Apollo insulting his archery skill so he struck Apollo with golden love-arrows and pierced Daphne with lead arrows of hate. Daphne fled from Apollo until she reached the River Peneius (her father) where she prayed for his help. Just as Apollo grabbed her Daphne transformed into a laurel tree. Apollo made the laurel his special tree and thereafter crowned himself with laurels. APOLLO THE FAR-DARTER, GOD OF PROPHECY The historical origin of Apollo is unknown, as is the meaning of his name. Many think his cult must have come from Asia Minor because he is called Lycian--that is, from Lycia--and because in Asia Minor there were many sites of his cult. However, Lycian could just as well mean wolflike, perhaps because at an early stage he protected shepherds from wolves. Wherever Apollos cult comes from, it has taken on associations with the far north: In winter, while Dionysus ruled at Delphi, Apollo dwelled among the Hyperboreans, the men beyond the North Wind. By the eighth century B.C., Apollo was already a great god. In the Classical Period, Apollo is sometimes called a sun god--as Artemis was by then thought to represent the dark and the moon--but in origin he had no connection with the sun. Though represented as an archer god, he is not a god of hunters; his arrows are the shafts of disease, irresistible, unseen, striking down the luckless. This association is made explicit in our oldest reference to him, at the beginning of the Iliad, where Apollo is the dangerous god of plague, called Lord of Mice, the plague-bringers. As soon as Artemis and Apollo were born, the hitherto floating islands of Delos and Ortygia (where Artemis was said to have been born) were anchored in their present places. The sacred palm that Leto grasped was a landmark outside the elaborate temple complex that sprang up on Delos during the Classical Period; true to Letos prediction, Delos, whose area is only two square miles, became one of the richest and most celebrated religious shrines in all Greece (today the island is uninhabited). From other sources we learn that sacred swans arrived as soon as Apollo was born. They carried him to the shores of Ocean beyond the North Wind, to the land of the Hyperboreans--perhaps Siberia--where Apollo spent a year before returning to Greece. Another tradition reports that, only days after the twins birth, Hera released the giant Tityus from the earth to rape Leto, but Apollo and Artemis cut him down in a shower of arrows, and Zeus condemned him to eternal punishment in Hades. APOLLO AT DELPHI Apollos role in prophecy was especially associated with the oracular shrine to him at Delphi, perched on a precipitous slope of Mount Parnassus near the Corinthian Gulf. The second part of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo begins with an account of how Apollo, after being born, joined the gods on Olympus. Apollos destruction of the serpent Python is a Greek form of the ancient Eastern story of the dragon combat. The rest of the hymn reports Apollos vengeance against Telphusa for sending him to a dragon-infested mountain: he buries her beneath a cliff and builds a small shrine for himself. While wondering how to get priests for his temple, Apollo spies a Cretan ship at sea. Taking the form of a dolphin, he leaps on board, a terrifying portent. The sailors huddle together while Apollo guides the ship to Crisa, the coastal village near Delphi. There he reveals himself as a handsome man in his prime, with long locks drooping over his shoulders, and makes them priests of his temple. Evidently the poet derives Delphi from Greek delphis, dolphin, the form in which the god appeared to the sailors. When the Cretans see Delphi perched on a precipitous slope, with no place for crops or herds, they fall into despair. But Apollo comforts them: They will have plenty to eat from the rich offerings brought there, and so they did. Other sources complete the tale. Having killed the dragon, Apollo had to be cleansed from miasma, blood pollution. He therefore traveled to the Valley of Tempe, in Thessaly at the foot of towering Mount Olympus; there he was ritually cleansed. Every eight years the Delphians celebrated the death of Python and the cleansing of Apollo. Because Apollo was himself cleansed of miasma (stain, pollution), he could free others from it too, and many pilgrims journeyed to his temple at Delphi to submit to the appropriate ritual of purification. THE DELPHIC ORACLE Images: Herakles tries to become the god of the oracle The second half of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo makes much of the gods eagerness to establish an oracular shrine so that he might enjoy its income and renown, but it tells us little about the history of the shrine and even less about the procedure followed there. Like the shrine at Delos, Delphi was a pan-Hellenic religious center to which all Greeks paid respect, regardless of their unending political differences. The oracle at Delphi functioned under Apollo for over a thousand years (c. 800 B.C.-A.D.394); it was the most renowned oracle of the ancient world. The Greeks regarded Delphi as the center of the world, a location determined by Zeus when he sent out two eagles, one from each horizon, to see where they would cross. In the temple at Delphi stood a conical stone called the omphalos, marking the site as the worlds navel. According to legend, there was an earlier oracle at Delphi, which functioned under the goddess Gaea or Themis, and many scholars interpret the slaying of Python, the earth monster, to stand for Apollos displacement of the earlier earth oracle. The notion of the world-navel, in addition to the fact that at Delphi oracular responses were always given by a woman, encourages the view that the shrine did once belong to an earth goddess, but archaeologists have found no evidence to confirm it. The prophetess at Delphi was called the PYTHIA after the dragon Python. Originally she was a young virgin from the local village, but older women later served in this office. She seems to have had no special training. Most scholars understand her to have functioned as a medium, someone whose body served as an instrument for divine orders, although the precise nature of her inspiration remains a mystery. Ancient traditions report that she inhaled vapors from a chasm in order to achieve a state of ecstasy, but no chasm has been found beneath the temple. Other accounts state that she chewed hallucinogenic laurel leaves, but the laurel, sacred to Apollo, has no hallucinogenic power. The Greeks were as puzzled as we by how the Pythia functioned. When preparing to answer questions, the Pythia took her seat on a bronze tripod in the inner sanctum, the section not to be entered, of Apollos temple. Questions were put by a male priest after the inquirer had made appropriate sacrifice (the priests received the meat). The Pythia, possessed by the god, made replies, which the priests recast in a poetic form to give to the inquirer. Although most questions were of a personal nature, questions of communal interest were also asked. In the days of western colonization, during the eighth century B.C. and later, Apollo was consulted about where to settle, what gods to worship, and what form of government to adopt, and Delphi became a center for the exchange of information about all of the Mediterranean world. The literary accounts of Delphic responses, however, are famous for their dark ambiguity. Herodotus tells us about Croesus, king of Lydia, a rich and powerful ruler threatened by the Persians, who considered making a preemptive strike. Though not a Greek, he sent messengers with gifts to Delphi and asked what the outcome of the struggle would be. If you make war on the Persians, he was informed, you will destroy a mighty empire. Thus encouraged, he attacked, but was defeated and captured; the empire he destroyed was his own. Later (480 B.C.) when the Persians attacked Athens, the city inquired of Apollo how it might be saved. Trust in your wooden walls, the oracle replied. Because there was an old wooden palisade on the Acropolis, some Athenians took refuge there and were wiped out. Themistocles, the Athenian general, embarked the rest of the people in the newly built Athenian fleet, which engaged and annihilated the Persian navy: the ships hulls were the wooden walls of the oracle. In such literary accounts of oracular responses we must remember the prejudices and preferences of our written sources, whose principal purpose was to tell a good story. In addition to its role in prophecy, the shrine at Delphi came to have a broadly ethical authority, encouraging the virtues of moderation and restraint and denying projects that were reckless or did not take sufficient account of the uncertainty of human fortune. Carved on the temple were the exhortations Know yourself and Nothing too much, mottoes with similar meaning: You are only human, so dont try more than you are able (or you will pay the consequences). A recurring theme in Greek myth is the man or woman who loses sight of human limitations and acts arrogantly and with violence, as if immortal. As the oral poet was the bearer, through his song, of traditional male aristocratic Greek culture, Apollo the singer became the god of the Greek aristocrats, a projection of their own self-image. Many stories were told about Apollos skill with the lyre, in art his most common attribute. According to a story made famous by Ovid and beloved by European painters of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the satyr Marsyas, master of the double-flute, challenged Apollo to a musical contest, the winner being allowed to do as he liked; Apollo won easily and flayed Marsyas alive. APOLLOS UNHAPPY LOVES Apollo was claimed as ancestor by families of prophets. However, many stories tell of his unsuccessful love affairs, which for some reason were numerous and beloved in late antiquity; Ovid makes much of them in his Metamorphoses. Such stories sometimes refer to Apollos power to make human beings prophets, and the riddle and danger of this power. Priam, king of Troy, and his wife, Hecuba, had twins, HELENUS and CASSANDRA. Cassandra grew into a woman beautiful enough to rouse the lust ofApollo and shrewd enough to demand that he make her a prophet in return for her favors. Apollo agreed, but Cassandra nonetheless refused to sleep with him. Instead of taking back his gift, Apollo added a condition: although Cassandra would always speak the truth, no one would believe her. Repeatedly she prophesied the ruin of Troy; no one listened. When Troy fell, Cassandra was carried off as booty by Agamemnon and butchered, along with her captor, by Agamemnons wife, Clytemnestra. Today we call a Cassandra someone whose truthful words are ignored. A similar story is told of Apollos love for the first SIBYL AT CUMAE, to whom he gave as many years of life as the grains of sand she could scoop up in her hands. She accepted the gift, then refused to sleep with him. Apollo, though true to his word, failed to grant a lasting youth to accompany her very long life. The Sibyl grew older and older until she shriveled up like a cicada. One of the best-known affairs is his love for Daphne, a nymph, daughter of the river god Peneus in Thessaly. She rejected him, but he pursued her into the mountains. To escape, she prayed to her father, who changed her into a laurel tree. The story is etiological to explain why the laurel is Apollos sacred plant. Apollo, no less than Zeus, was subject to the attractions ofyoung men. He loved HYACINTH, a beautiful boy. One day they were practicing the discus (as good aristocrats do). A gust of wind caught the discus so that it swerved into Hyacinths head and killed him. Apollo caused the hyacinth flower to grow from his blood. Ever after, the dead youth was honored each year at his tomb near Sparta. Hyacinths name is certainly pre-Greek, perhaps a dying god of fertility. Apollo, god of prophecy, is also god of healing, and one of his tragic love affairs was connected with the origin of the Greek god of medicine, ASCLEPIUS, whom he conceived on a mortal woman, Coronis. While pregnant with Asclepius, Coronis slept with a mortal named Ischys, a thoughtless deed witnessed by a crow, who reported it to Apollo. The wise and virtuous centaur CHIRON knew well the art of medicine (although we are not told where he learned it) and taught the infant brought to him, Asclepius, all that he knew. Asclepius became a great doctor, even raising the dead. Athena had taken from the neck of the slain Gorgon Medusa two phials of blood: That from the left side of her neck cured all ailments, that from the right brought immediate death. The first phial she gave to Asclepius, who with it revived Hippolytus, son of Theseus, dragged to death overjagged rocks after Theseus cursed him. Asclepius is generally pictured with a serpent, often wound about a staff, no doubt because the snake has the ability to restore its health and vigor by shedding its skin. Serpents were kept in his shrines. The name of Hygieia health personified, said to be his wife or daughter, gives rise to our word hygiene. In his functions as god of prophecy and healing and of the musical and poetic skills so valued by the Greek aristocracy, Apollo came to embody order against barbarism. reason against unreason, and what many have called the Hellenic spirit. In the Classical period Apollo represented the Greek aristocratic ideal of young, vigorous manhood. On the pediment of the temple to Zeus at Olympia, whose cult statue was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Apollo stands calm and beardless, arm outstretched against the savage Centaurs trying to carry off Greek women. In the Persian Wars, by supporting nonresistance to the invaders through many oracles, the Delphic Oracle lost much of its old respect, but in matters affecting individuals it remained influential. A friend of Socrates asked, Who is the wisest of men! The oracle replied, Socrates. This puzzled the philosopher, until he realized that other men thought that they knew a lot; Socrates alone realized his own ignorance. About A.D. 100 Plutarch, himself a priest of Apollo, wrote a gloomy work on the growing decay of the oracles. They were finally closed down by the emperor Theodosius about A.D. 390. Long before this, we are told by the Christian historian Eusebius in a burst of wishful thinking that the emperor Augustus (27 B.C.--A.D. 14) went to Delphi to ask who would reign after him. The Pythia gave no answer, so Augustus asked why the prophetic shrine was silent. At last the god replied through the priestess: A son of the Hebrews, a god and ruler over the blessed, has bidden me leave this house and return to the realm of Hades. Depart from this altar in silence, and never come back with your queries.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 22:16:52 +0000
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