Apollo

Birth on Delos

Apollo is the son of Zeus and the Titaness Leto, and the twin brother of Artemis ^3,4. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo tells how Leto, hounded by the jealousy of Hera, was refused shelter by every land until the small, poor, rocky island of Delos agreed to receive her — on the condition that the god born there would build his temple on it and never despise it for its barrenness. Leto laboured nine days and nine nights, clinging to a palm tree, until Apollo was born and the island's foundations turned to gold ².

The infant grew at once. Fed on nectar and ambrosia rather than milk, he burst his swaddling bands, called for the lyre and the curved bow, and declared that he would prophesy to men the unerring will of Zeus ². That triple claim — bow, lyre, oracle — is the whole god in one line, and the Greeks never separated the three.

The Far-Shooter

The Iliad opens with Apollo at his most terrifying. His priest Chryses is insulted by Agamemnon; the god comes down from Olympus "like the night", takes his stand apart from the ships, and looses arrows into the Greek camp for nine days, killing mules and dogs first, then men ¹. He is Hekatebolos, the far-shooter, and Smintheus, a title connected with mice — a plague god as readily as a healer, since the power that sends sickness is the power that lifts it ^1,7.

The same detachment marks his role in battle. He shepherds Hector, blunts Diomedes, and in Book 16 strikes Patroclus between the shoulders, knocking off his helmet and loosening his armour so that lesser hands can finish him ¹. Where Ares fights, Apollo simply decides; scholars often read him as the Greek ideal of measured, ordered force, the god of the "nothing in excess" carved at Delphi ⁷.

Delphi and the Oracle

Having left Delos, Apollo searched for an oracular seat and found the spring of Telphousa and then the site under Parnassus, where he killed the great she-serpent guarding it and let her corpse rot in the sun — the hymn's own explanation for the names Pytho and Pythian ^2,5. He then seized a shipload of Cretan merchants, appearing to them as a dolphin, and installed them as his first priests, which the hymn offers as the origin of the title Delphinios ². These etymologies are ancient folk explanations rather than modern linguistics, and scholars treat them as such ⁷.

At Delphi a priestess called the Pythia, seated on a tripod, delivered responses that Greeks from every city and many beyond it came to consult ^5,7. The god's oracular epithet Loxias — "slanting", "oblique" — reflects the reputation of those responses for saying something true in a form the hearer would misread ^5,7. Ancient writers spoke of vapours rising from a chasm; the archaeology is contested, and no consensus exists on what, if anything, physically induced the Pythia's state ⁷.

Music, Healing, and Punishment

As Musagetes Apollo leads the Muses, and the lyre given him by Hermes is his emblem in nearly all classical art ^2,4. He is also the father of Asclepius, the healer, by the mortal Coronis, whom he killed for her infidelity and whose child he snatched from the pyre ^4,8. When Zeus later destroyed Asclepius for raising the dead, Apollo killed the Cyclopes who forged the thunderbolt and was sentenced to a year's servitude as a mortal's herdsman ^4,8.

His myths of desire are mostly myths of loss. Daphne, fleeing him, becomes the laurel that afterwards crowns him; Hyacinthus dies from a discus throw and becomes a flower; Cassandra accepts the gift of prophecy, refuses the god, and is cursed so that no one will believe her ^4,6,8. Challenges to his art end worse still: the satyr Marsyas, beaten in a music contest, is flayed ^6,8.

Cult, Sun, and Afterlife

Beyond the stories, Apollo governed purification, colonisation (no colony sailed without consulting Delphi), the calendar of festivals, and the passage of young men into adult citizenship ^5,7. His great sanctuaries at Delphi, Delos, Didyma and Claros were among the wealthiest institutions in the Greek world ^5,7.

He is very often called a sun god today, but that identification is secondary. In Homer and Hesiod the sun is Helios, a separate deity; the merging of Apollo with Helios appears in the fifth century BC, spreads through philosophical and Orphic circles, and becomes standard only in the Roman period ^7,8. Some scholars have also argued for an Anatolian element in his origins, on the strength of his Trojan sympathies and possible Hittite-Luwian name parallels — a debate that remains open ⁷.

The modern shorthand of "Apollonian" order against "Dionysian" ecstasy comes from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), not from the Greeks, who housed both gods at Delphi and gave Dionysus the sanctuary for the winter months ^5,7.