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Apollo Biography

Apollo Image

APOLLO (Gk.) Next to Zeus, the most important and most widely worshiped divinity of Greece. Later antiquity identified Apollo with the sun, but in Homer the two are entirely distinct. As to the origin and the meaning of the name Apollo, there is no general agreement among scholars, though the weight of argument is slightly in favor of those who interpret it as ‘he who wards off,’ ‘he who drives away’ evil, from which conception it is easy to explain many of the varied forms of the Apollo cult. Thus Apollo is a god who heals diseases and purifies from moral defilement. So he was said to have purified Orestes (q.v.) for the murder of his mother, and so he was invoked to purify and cleanse entire communities afflicted by pestilence. In the same way his protection was extended to flocks and herds, as is shown by his epithet Nomios, and by the story of his serving as the shepherd of Admetus (q.v.), to the great increase of the flocks of that King. He also appears as protecting the grain from mildew, and as driving away field-mice, whence his surname Smintheus; as Apollo Parnopios he kept off the locusts. There are also traces of Apollo as a war god, who can drive away the enemy and who mingles actively in the fray; at the shrine in Amyclæ (q.v.), near Sparta, he appeared with a helmet and a lance. Nor is this view of the original conception of Apollo in any way inconsistent with his very obvious connection with the light. For that he was early connected with the sun is clear, from the celebration of his departure in the autumn to a distant land, and his return in the spring. light is regarded as a healer and protector, the bane of evil spirits who love darkness. The light and heat, however, are not always beneficent, and Apollo thus appears as the sender of pestilence and as bringing sudden death with his unerring arrows. As a light-god, also, he is called Lycean and Lycian; these terms may be connected with the Latin lux, ‘light’: The ancients connected them with the Greek word for ‘wolf’ (lykos), and some good modern authorities consider Apollo as originally a herdsman's divinity in the form of a wolf. In a kindred view "Apollo was one outgrowth of the shepherd-god existing in each community, himself once a shepherd, protecting the sheep from wolves, patron of the music and the games that shepherds love." He is also styled Phoebus , the ‘bright one,’ the ‘brilliant one.’ Whatever may have been his early nature, the prominent conception of Apollo in historic times was as a god of prophecy and so of music and song. His most famous oracle was at Delphi (q.v.), but there were others at Delos; at the Ismenian sanctuary near Thebes; at Abæ, on the border of Phocis; at Patara, in Lycia; and at Claros, in Ionia, near Colophon. Apollo was also a god of colonization, and many Greek cities believed that their founders had been guided by Apollo in the form of an animal or bird.

As is natural in the case of a god so widely worshiped, the legends of Apollo are highly diversified, though the main features show considerable unity, due to the overpowering influence of the cults at Delphi and Delos, which made their versions canonical. He was the son of Zeus and Leto (Latona), born with his twin sister Artemis (see DIANA) on the island of Delos, which had hitherto floated on the sea, but now became fixed, and afforded a refuge: for Leto, who had been driven from all other places by the wrath of Hera (see Juno). After his birth the god hastened to Delphi and slew the dragon Python, who had pursued his mother during her sorrow. For other legends see ADMETUS; HYPERBOREANS; LAOMEDON; NIOBE. In Greece Apollo was not the god of any single race. The Ionians worshiped him as the ancestral god, Patroös: the great Dorian festival, Carneia (see GREEK FESTIVALS), was held in his honor. At Athens, at the Thargelia, in May, first fruits were offered to him, there were musical contests in his honor, and the city was purified by special rites that the ripened grain might escape his wrath. In Rome his worship was introduced from Greece at a comparatively late date. The earliest mention of a place of worship for Apollo is in 443 B.C., and it was not till 212 B.C. that the Ludi Apollinares were celebrated. Augustus greatly increased the honor of the god in gratitude for the victory of Actium (q.v.) (for Apollo's help of Augustus at Actium see Vergil, Æneid, viii, 704 ff.), and built him a splendid temple on the Palatine, with which a library was connected. The temple contained the celebrated statue of the god by Scopas.

The representations of Apollo in ancient art are almost innumerable. As Apollo Agyieus, or Apollo of the Streets, he was worshiped in the form of a conical stone. In general, two chief types can be distinguished. In the one Apollo appears as a nude youth, the ideal of youthful strength and beauty. This can be traced from the rude statues of archaic art, of Melos, Thera, and Orchomenus, through the Payne-Knight bronze, and the Choiseul-Gouffier marble in the British Museum, to the almost effeminate type of the Apollo Sauroctonos (the lizard-slayer) of Praxiteles, or the glorious divinity of the Apollo of the altar frieze from Pergamon (q.v.). The other type represents the god as clad in the long robe of the musician playing on the lyre, as he appears in the statue in the Vatican (see APOLLO BELVEDERE), which is probably a copy of the work of Scopas. The special attributes of Apollo are the bow and the quiver, the laurel and the lyre.