APOLLO

APOLLO , the son of Zeus and Leto and the twin brother of Artemis, is the Greek god whom the European tradition already associated with the aesthetic splendor and brilliance of Greece before Johann Jakob Winckelmann (1717–1768), the founder of Greek art history, regarded the Belvedere Apollo (a Roman copy of a fourth-century Greek original that shows Apollo as a youthful archer) as the most perfect embodiment of Greek aesthetics and Greek gods. Apollo's image as a beautiful and permanently young man significantly contributed to this modern evaluation, as did Apollo's identification with the sun. His darker sides, expressed through his deathly mastery of archery, were eclipsed in this modern reception. In Greek myth, Apollo is the favorite son of Zeus but has relatively few independent stories; he is connected either with young men and women, or with specific sanctuaries such as Delos or Delphi. In Greek religion, Apollo was the protector of young males and presided over divination, healing, and the complex of music and dance (Greek, molpē ), whereas Etruscan and Roman religion embraced him almost exclusively as a healer.

The Etymology of Apollo

Almost uniquely among the twelve Olympian gods, Apollo's name does not appear in the Mycenaean Bronze Age texts; these texts only preserve a god called Paiawon, presumably an early form of Apollo's later epithet "Paian." In Homer and Hesiod, however (that is, in the late eighth or early seventh centuries bce), Apollo's mythical and religious roles are firmly established, presumably developing and spreading during the intervening Dark Ages of the eleventh through the ninth centuries bce.

Among the many competing modern etymologies of his name, the derivation from the Doric apella, "association of the free male citizen" (Burkert, 1975, pp. 1–12), has found the most adherence; the marginality of the Dorians in the Greek Bronze Age and their immigration into most of Southern Greece—from the Peloponnese to the islands of Crete and Rhodes—explains Apollo's absence in the Bronze Age, as well as his position in the early Iron Age and his function as the protector of the young warriors and their institutions based on common song and dance. That the month Apellaios is the first month in Delphi points to a connection between the New Year's festival, citizens' associations, and the introduction of the young warriors into society through their display of song and dance; it is, however, impossible to derive all functions of Apollo from this or any other homogeneous ritual complex.

Apollo in Delous and Delphi

In early Greek poetry, Apollo's mythical and cultic personality is fully established. Born on the island of Delos (Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 25–178 [seventh century bce]) against the will of Hera, Apollo's birth founds and legitimates the great renown of the Delian sanctuary—the central sanctuary for the cities of archaic Ionia—and a sacred island for all of Greece in later times (see Callimachus, Hymn 4). Apollo's main monument on the island was an altar made from the horns of sacrificial goats. The monument stood next to the palm tree that lent support to Leto when giving birth (Odyssey 6,162–163). (Such altars are attested to in other Apolline sanctuaries as well.) His birthday, on the seventh day of an unstated month (Hesiod, Works and Days 771), was the day most festivals of Apollo were held—the seventh day of a given month—yet they could also fall on the first day of a month (Apollo Noumēnios, "He of the New Moon").

Apollo's first youthful exploit is the killing of the snake Pytho and the foundation of his other main sanctuary, the oracular shrine of Delphi (Homeric Hymn to Apollo, vs. 214–544; Iliad 9.404–405), by far the most important oracular shrine in archaic and classical Greece. In order to punish the sacrilegious arrogance of the Greek leaders in Troy, Apollo sends a plague into their camp (Iliad 1.44–52); the plague is then healed through a sumptuous sacrifice, purificatory rites, and the singing and dancing of a paean by the "young men of the Achaeans" (Iliad 1.313–474). Apollo had caused the plague by shooting animals and men with his arrows, and thus his archery is an image for the deadly power of the illness. Much later, an image of the archer Apollo, erected in a city gate, was thought to avert disease and evil from the city. His arrows were believed to send swift and unexpected death to men in the same way that Artemis's arrows could kill women. Yet Apollo is also considered the patron god of real archers.

One of Apollo's other attributes is his playing of the lyre. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes (sixth century bce) narrates how Hermes made the first lyre out of the shell of a tortoise and gave it to his older brother Apollo. The same Hymn makes it clear that divination, to know the "mind of Zeus," is Apollo's prerogative alone (vs. 471–472).

Most Panhellenic sanctuaries of Apollo were major oracular shrines (Delos is the one exception). Alongside Delphi, the sanctuaries in Didyma near Miletus and Clarus near Colophon in Western Asia Minor were already important in archaic Greece; they remained famous to the end of pagan antiquity. The Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri refer to Clarian and Pythian Apollo as conferring private oracular dreams (Papyri Graecae Magicse II .130, fourth century ce), and the Tübingen Theosophy, a sixth century Christian treatise, still cites Clarian oracles to support the thesis of a pagan preknowledge of Christian theology. The ritual forms of divination differed from sanctuary to sanctuary, although they all had a medium prophesy in an altered state of consciousness; in Clarus and Didyma, the water of a sacred spring provoked ecstasy in a priest (Clarus) or priestess (Didyma), whereas in later sources the Delphian Pythia was said to prophesy under the influence of mephitic gases. Apollo also attracted noninstitutionalized divination: both the sibyl and the Trojan seer Cassandra were said to be his lovers.

Apollo's Cultic Roles

The cults in individual cities stress other aspects of Apollo, especially his connection with young men (ephebes) and male citizens on the one hand, and with his power for healing on the other.

Apollo the Healer (Iētros, Oulios ) is mainly attested to in the Greek East from the sixth to the fourth centuries bce. Slowly, however, this function was taken over by Apollo's son Asclepius, with whom he shared many important healing sanctuaries—such as Epidaurus or Kos. Although official documents from these sanctuaries stress the coexistence of both deities, private worship focused solely on Asclepius. Asclepian healing focuses on incubation and dream oracles. It can be seen as specialized form of Apolline divination, and Apollo himself could be called iatromantis, the "healing seer," and had close ties to the mythical seer and healer Melampus. As a healer, Apollo had already been adopted by the Etruscans and Romans prior to the fifth century bce. Apollo Medicus (Healer) was introduced in Rome to heal a plague in 431 bce (Livy 4.25.3). The sanctuary survived the introduction of the Greek Asculapius in 293 bce and was restored under Augustus.

More generally, Apollo was seen as a divinity that kept away evil (averter, apotropaios ). Together with his sister Artemis, he guarded the city gates, and in a crisis, an image of the archer Apollo could defend a city against disease. Private houses were protected by simple stone pillars that were taken as Apolline symbols (agyieus ). In the cities of the Greek East and in Athens, the Apolline festival Thargelia was a festival of purification. The Athenians celebrated it on Thargelion 6 and 7 (the penultimate month of the year), and, as in some Ionian cities, they performed among other rites a scapegoat ritual (pharmakos ) in order to cleanse the city before the period of reversal that leads to the Athenian New Year.

But at least as important as these functions is Apollo's connection with the young men of the city, connections already visible in the derivation of his name from apella and so fundamental as to shape Apollo's iconography as an eternally young man (ephebe), complete with an ephebe's long hair and adolescent body. The Spartans performed several Apolline festivals in which the young men were central: the Gymnopaidia (Naked dances), which had their ritual center in the singing and dancing of young male choruses; the Karneia—the main festival of many Doric cities—were entirely organized by the young citizens; and the Hyacinthia—the main Spartan festival—featured as its etiological myth the story of how Apollo killed his adolescent lover Hyacinthus with the mistaken throw of a discus. Although the ritual combined grief for Hyacinthus with dance performances of boys and young men, the iconography of Apollo turned him into an archaic warrior who was depicted with shield and lance.

Yet the complex of dancing and singing of all-male groups—called molpē by the Greeks—is in archaic Greece noted well beyond the world of the Doric cities. Apollo enters this complex there as well. Perhaps the most prominent group in which Apollo figures is with the molpoi of archaic Miletus—an aristocratic cult group whose leader was, at the same time, the supreme official of the city. These Milesian molpoi were associated with the cult of Apollo Delphinios and, to some degree, with oracular Apollo in Didyma. When the Milesians founded their colony of Olbia in the Black Sea, they introduced the same institution, and it is in institutions like these—with a common meal as well as common dancing and singing—that musical Apollo finds his origin and social relevance.

Among the later developments of Apollo's image, two have to be singled out: his identification with the sun, and the opposition between Apollo and Dionysos. The identification with the sun and with Helios is first attested in the early fifth century bce but becomes important only much later, especially in astrology where Apollo represented the "planet" sun and his sister Artemis the "planet" moon; astrological iconography transmits this into the European Middle Ages, whereas Apollo as sun is common in mythical allegories both in late antiquity and in the European Renaissance and Baroque epochs.

The opposition between Apollo and Dionysus has its cultic root in Delphi where Dionysus reigned during Apollo's absence in winter, and where Dionysos was even said to have his grave. The opposition gained sharper contours when Augustus (63 bce–14 ce) presented himself and his personal god Apollo to his antagonist Marc Anthony (82–30 bce), who stylized himself as the New Dionysus. Whereas Dionysus stood for all the decadent pleasures of the East, Apollo represented the purity and clarity of the order that Augustus restored and put under the patronage of an Apollo whose temple had become part of his house on the Palatine. Another point of view, from the early nineteenth century, describes how musical history made use of the same opposition in which Dionysus represented ecstatic music whereas Apollo represented serene, well-ordered tunes. From musical theory Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) would develop the opposition between the two gods as the basic feature of Greek tragedy.

See Also

Artemis; Delphi; Dionysos; Divination, article on Greek and Roman Divination; Hera; Hesiod; Homer; Muses; Oracles; Pythagoras; Sun.

Bibliography

Most of the ancient texts cited above are available in critical editions with English translations in the Loeb Classical Library.

Bentz, Martin, and Dieter Steinbauer. "Neues zum Aplu-Kult in Etrurien." Archäologischer Anzeiger (2001): 69–78.

Boyancé, Pierre. "L'Apollon solaire." In Mélanges d'archéologie, d'épigraphie et d'histoire offerts à Jean Carcopino. pp. 149–170. Paris, 1966.

Burkert, Walter. "Apellai und Apollon." Rheinisches Museum 118 (1975): 1–21.

Detienne, Marcel. Apollon le couteau à la main: Une approche expérimentale du polythéisme grec. Paris, 1998.

Dumézil, Georges. "Apollo Medicus." In Apollon sonore et autres essais:Vingt-cinq esquisses de mythologie, pp. 36–42. Paris, 1982.

Fontenrose, Joseph. The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations. Berkeley, Calif., 1978.

Fontenrose, Joseph. Didyma: Apollo's Oracle, Cult, and Companions. Berkeley, Calif., 1988.

Gagé, Jean. Apollon Romain: Essai sur le culte d'Apollon et le dévelopement du "ritus graecus" à Rome des origines à Auguste. Paris, 1955.

Pettersson, Michael. Cults of Apollo at Sparta: The Hyakinthia, the Gymnopaidia and the Karneia. Stockholm, 1992.

Solomon, Joe, ed. Apollo: Origins and Influences. Tucson, Ariz., 1994.

von Reibnitz, Barbara. "Apollinisch–Dionysisch." In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 1, pp. 246–271. Stuttgart, Germany, 2000.

Zeitlin, Froma I. "Apollo and Dionysos: Starting from Birth." In Kykeon: Studies in Honour of H. S. Versnel, edited by H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, et al. pp. 193–218. Leiden, Netherlands, 2002.

Fritz Graf (2005)