Apollo

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Apollo is one of the principal gods of the Greek pantheon: a son of Zeus, twin of Artemis, and the deity in whom prophecy, light, music, healing, and the disciplined violence of the bow were gathered into a single figure. The Greeks held him to be the most Greek of their gods and, at the same time, suspected he had come from elsewhere — a tension the ancient evidence never quite resolves. He is the god of measure who tells a man what he is by telling him what he is not; the bringer of disease whose son became the god of medicine; the master of the lyre whose music is order made audible. No single function organizes the rest. What holds the figure together is a quality rather than a portfolio — clarity, the bright edge that cuts, the line that divides the true from the false, the healthy from the diseased, the one from the many.

Twin of Artemis, son of Leto

The canonical birth-story belongs to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (the third of the so-called Homeric Hymns), a poem that ancient and modern readers alike have recognized as two compositions joined at the seam — a Delian section on the god’s birth and an island cult, and a Pythian section on the founding of his oracle, the join falling near the middle of the poem. By the surviving tradition the two halves were perhaps fitted together for a combined Delian and Pythian festival sponsored by Polycrates of Samos in the later sixth century BCE. The Delian half tells how Leto, pregnant by Zeus and pursued by the jealousy of Hera, wandered the Aegean unable to find a land that dared receive her. Only the small floating island of Delos consented, on the promise that the child would honor it forever; there, leaning against a palm by a low hill, Leto bore Apollo, while Hera withheld Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, so that the labor ran on for nine days. Artemis, by the common version, was born first, at Ortygia, and stood as midwife to her brother. The newborn god, fed on nectar and ambrosia, broke his swaddling-bands and announced his three offices at once: the lyre, the bow, and the declaring of the will of Zeus to men. Those three — music, the arrow, the oracle — are the whole god in miniature.

The Pythian half carries him to the slopes of Parnassus, where he kills the serpent that guards the spring, founds his sanctuary, and recruits his first priests by appearing to a Cretan ship in the shape of a dolphin and steering it to harbor — the origin the hymn gives for his title Delphinios and for the name Delphi itself. The serpent’s name, Python, gave the place its old name Pytho, the priestess her title Pythia, and the four-yearly games their name; the slaying is the founding act on which the oracle stands.

The god who spoke: Delphi and the oracle

Above all else Apollo was the god who answered. At Delphi, on a shelf of Parnassus the Greeks called the navel of the world, a priestess called the Pythia delivered his responses from the sunken inner chamber of the temple, and for over a thousand years the place functioned as something close to a Panhellenic institution — consulted on wars, laws, cults, and above all on the founding of colonies, so that half the Greek map carried Delphi’s sanction — a fitting charge for a god who was also patron of young men setting out into adulthood, the colonist among the gods. Oracles at Didyma near Miletus, at Claros, and elsewhere extended the same authority under the same god. The principle behind the machinery was that the voice was not the woman’s own mind but the god’s, and behind the god the will of his father: Apollo at Delphi was the interpreter of Zeus, the channel through which the unsearchable purpose of the sky-father reached men in words they could act on. This is the root of his title Loxias, the Oblique or Ambiguous — the answers were true, but slanted, requiring a second act of reading, as when Croesus was told that crossing the Halys would destroy a great empire and destroyed his own. The fuller account of the sanctuary, the Pythia, the mantic session and its long afterlife belongs to the entry on Delphi; what matters for the god is that prophecy was his defining office, the seat from which the other powers are most easily understood. The two maxims carved at his sanctuary — know thyself and nothing in excess — compress a whole theology of limit: the god of clarity tells the consultant first of all the boundaries of his own nature.

The mantic art radiated outward from the great oracle into a wider Apolline divination: the casting of lots, the reading of signs, the inspired seer (the mantis) who stood under the god’s patronage. Apollo was also, through this same office, the purifier — the god to whom one came after bloodshed to be cleansed, since the power that could read pollution could also lift it. Orestes, hounded by the Furies for his mother’s blood, is sent by Apollo to Athens and defended by the god at his trial in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the same play that sets out the succession of Delphi’s earlier holders — Earth, Themis, Phoebe — before the seat passed to Phoebus.

The lyre and the leadership of the Muses

If prophecy is the god’s gravity, music is his grace. Apollo is Musagetes, the leader of the Muses, who under his direction sing and dance on Olympus and on Helicon; he is the patron of the ordered arts of song, of the measured meter and the tuned string. His instrument is the lyre — by one strand of the tradition invented by the infant Hermes from a tortoise shell and handed to Apollo in exchange for the cattle Hermes had stolen, a bargain that fixes the division of labor between the two gods: Hermes the trickster of exchange and the road, Apollo the master of the harmonized note. The lyre is the civilized instrument, set against the wilder reed-pipe; the contest in which the satyr Marsyas challenged Apollo with the aulos and lost — judged by the Muses, the strung note defeating the breath of the reed — is the myth in which Apollo’s music asserts itself as the discipline of form over raw, breath-driven ecstasy. The flaying of Marsyas that follows is the cruelty inside the god of measure, the same hand that heals turned to a punishment without mercy. Music for Apollo is not entertainment but cosmology: the tuned string is proportion made hearable, the audible face of the same order the oracle speaks and the bow enforces. The later doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, which the Pythagoreans developed into a mathematics of the cosmos, found in Apollo its natural patron — the god whose lyre and whose number are one thing.

Healer and plague-bringer

Apollo’s bow is double-edged. The same arrows that strike disease into a camp can be turned to lift it, and the Greeks did not separate the two. The Iliad opens with this duality at full force: Apollo Smintheus, his priest Chryses dishonored by Agamemnon, comes down from Olympus dark as the falling night, and his arrows loose a plague on the Achaean army for nine days, the funeral pyres burning until the offense is repaired. The epithet Paean names him the healer, the singer of the song that drives off sickness; the epithet Loimios names him the sender of the plague itself. Out of this healing office came Asclepius, Apollo’s son by the mortal Coronis, who carried the medical art further than his father and was worshipped in his own right as the god of healing, his temples curing by incubated dream. Apollo is thus the source of medicine without being its perfected practitioner — the god who opens the art and hands it down, much as he opens prophecy and music. The pattern recurs: Apollo stands at the threshold of a domain, defines it, and entrusts its working-out to others, to the Pythia, to the Muses, to his physician son.

A god from elsewhere: the question of origins

Where the figure came from is genuinely uncertain, and the Greeks themselves felt it. The name has no secure Greek etymology. Walter Burkert distinguished three strands braided into the historical Apollo — a Dorian and northwest-Greek element, a Cretan-Minoan element, and a Syrian-Hittite element — and the Hittite divine name Apaliunas, appearing in a treaty concerning Wilusa (Troy), has been read as a possible eastern cognate, though the identification stays debated. The Greeks offered their own etymologies, and these are themselves part of his history: most often they linked the name to the verb apollymi, “to destroy,” making the bright god also the destroyer, which suits the plague-bringer well enough. Plato, in the Cratylus, played the name instead toward purification and release and simple unity. What can be established beyond the etymology is the sheer density of his worship from the eighth century BCE onward, and the political weight his oracles carried across the Greek world. The suspicion that the most Greek of gods had foreign roots is not a modern scholarly embarrassment; it is built into the ancient material, which makes Apollo a god of arrivals — born on a wandering island, sailing in as a dolphin, returning each spring from the far north.

The northern winter: the Hyperboreans

For three months of the year Apollo was not at Delphi. The winter belonged to Dionysus, and Apollo was held to withdraw to the Hyperboreans, a blessed people living beyond the north wind in a land of perpetual festival, returning to Greece with the spring. Herodotus records the offerings the Hyperboreans were said to send south to Delos wrapped in straw, passed hand to hand from nation to nation, and the maidens who once carried them and died on the island. The yearly absence and return is the temporal frame for the deepest of the god’s polarities — the alternation of his sanctuary between the god of form and the god of dissolution.

Apollonian and Dionysian

That alternation at Delphi gave a later age its most durable image of the two gods as complementary opposites. Dionysus — wine, possession, the dissolution of the bounded self, the ecstasy that breaks form open — held the temple in the dark months; Apollo, clarity and limit and the individuated shape, held it in the bright. The Greeks shared the sanctuary between them deliberately, and the philosophical reading of the pair as the two forces of art — the dreaming, form-giving Apolline and the intoxicated, form-dissolving Dionysian — was drawn out most influentially in the nineteenth century, where it became a lens for tragedy and for culture itself. The polarity belongs equally to both gods; the entry on Dionysus carries the other half. What the Apolline pole contributes is the principle of the boundary: the dream that has an edge, the individual that does not melt into the mass, the note that holds its pitch.

The drift toward the sun

In the long arc of antiquity Apollo gathered into himself the sun. The identification with Helios, the personified Sun, appears from the fifth century BCE and grows steadily firmer through the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Cicero, reporting the theology of his day in On the Nature of the Gods, treats the identification of Sol with Apollo (and Luna with Diana) as a Stoic commonplace; Latin theological writing had assimilated Apollo to Sol by the first century BCE, even as the Latin poets kept the older Helios distinct for another century or so before Phoebus absorbed him entirely — the chariot of the sun becoming Apollo’s chariot, the daylight his light. The Stoics, who read the gods of myth as allegories of physical and rational forces, found in the sun the natural body of the god of reason and clarity, and the equation hardened into doctrine.

By late antiquity the solar Apollo had become a piece of theological argument. Macrobius, in the Saturnalia (early fifth century CE), gives the Roman senator and pagan dignitary Vettius Agorius Praetextatus a long discourse arguing that the great gods of Rome and of the East — Apollo above all, but also Liber/Bacchus, Mars, Mercury, and the rest — are so many names and faces of a single power, the Sun. The bow becomes the rays, the healing the warmth that ripens, the prophecy the all-seeing light that misses nothing; every Apolline attribute is rewritten as a solar one. This is solar monotheism in pagan dress, the many gods resolved into one luminous principle — and it is also, not coincidentally, the moment at which the old polytheism was contracting under Christian pressure into something it could defend as a unity.

Apollo in philosophy and theurgy

The philosophers had prepared the ground for this. Long before Macrobius, the Platonists fond of etymology had read the name Apollo as a-pollon — “not many,” the negation of plurality — and so made the god a figure of the One. The locus is Plutarch, priest of Apollo at Delphi in the early second century CE, whose dialogue The E at Delphi puts the reading in the mouth of his teacher Ammonius: the name Apollo denies multitude, “Ieios” signifies one and one only, and Phoebus names what is clean and pure — three names declaring the god to be single, undivided, and unmixed, the only being that fully is against the flux of all that merely becomes. The mysterious letter E inscribed at the sanctuary, Ammonius concludes, is to be read as ei, “Thou art” — the worshipper’s address to the god of pure unchanging Being. Here the Delphic Apollo becomes a philosophical theology: the god of the oracle is the god of unity, and to consult him is to be turned toward what does not change.

The Neoplatonists folded this directly into their metaphysics of light and ascent. In the developed system, the sensible sun is the visible image of the intelligible Good — the One radiating being as the sun radiates light, a figure already latent in Plato’s simile of the sun in the Republic and drawn out by Plotinus and his successors. The emperor Julian, the last pagan ruler of Rome, gave this its most elaborate statement in his Hymn to King Helios (362 CE), a Neoplatonic theology in three tiers — the transcendent Good, the intellectual Sun that mediates, and the visible disk — built on the doctrines of Iamblichus. Julian’s central solar god is the intellectual Helios, paired especially with the Persian Mithras; Apollo figures among the manifestations of that god rather than as its summit, but the Apolline material — oracle, healing, the unifying light — feeds the synthesis throughout. The solar Apollo of Macrobius and the One-Apollo of Plutarch meet in this late theology of the sun.

It is by this route that Apollo enters the world of theurgy and the Chaldean Oracles. The Oracles, the verse-fragments that the Neoplatonists from Iamblichus to Proclus treated as revealed scripture, center on a theology of paternal Fire and a hierarchy of light — a metaphysics in which solar and igneous imagery carries the soul’s ascent back toward its source. Apollo, as the god of the intelligible sun and the giver of oracles, sits naturally in this current: the theurgists understood divine prophecy and divine light as the same descending power, and the rites of ascent move toward a fire that is the Apolline-solar principle raised to metaphysics. The oracle that once spoke through a woman on a tripod becomes, in this reading, one instance of a cosmic self-disclosure of the divine. The fuller architecture of that tradition, and the question of how theurgic ascent was understood to work, belong to the entries on theurgy, Iamblichus, and the Chaldean Oracles; what matters here is that the most Greek of gods ended antiquity as a name for the light at the top of the Neoplatonic cosmos.

Scholarship, texts, and the sources

The primary literary foundation is the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Hymn 3), the seventh-century-BCE Delian-and-Pythian poem that fixes the birth on Delos and the founding of the oracle; it survives in the standard editions of the Homeric Hymns and is freely available in translation through Perseus. For the cult and the structure of Greek religion, the indispensable modern synthesis is Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard University Press, 1985; German original 1977), which treats Apollo’s composite origins and his place in the polis; the chapter on Apollo is the starting point for the origins debate. The fullest freely accessible gathering of the ancient sources on the god — cult title by cult title and myth by myth, in translation — is the Theoi Project’s Apollon compendium. The philosophical afterlife runs through Plutarch’s Delphic dialogues — The E at Delphi, On the Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse, and On the Obsolescence of Oracles — in which the god of the oracle becomes the god of unity and pure Being; the E at Delphi is hosted in English by the Penelope project at the University of Chicago, and the Library mirrors Plato’s Apology, where Socrates’ whole career is hung on the Delphic answer that no man was wiser than he, and Plato’s Cratylus, which plays out the etymologies of the divine names.

For the solar Apollo, the key late text is Macrobius, Saturnalia Book I, the extended solar theology now available in Robert A. Kaster’s Loeb edition (Harvard University Press, 2011), which prints the Latin and English en face in the Loeb Classical Library. Julian’s Hymn to King Helios — the most developed Neoplatonic solar theology, drawn from Iamblichus — is read in Wilmer Cave Wright’s translation in The Works of the Emperor Julian (Loeb, 1913), transcribed at Wikisource. The connection of the solar-Apolline principle to the theurgic ascent is best approached through the Chaldean Oracles, for which the Library hosts G. R. S. Mead’s The Chaldæan Oracles (1908), the first English presentation grounded on Wilhelm Kroll’s 1894 critical Greek text; the standard modern critical edition is Ruth Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Brill, 1989). On the geology and the long debate over the vapors that were said to inspire the Pythia, the entry on Delphi carries the apparatus.

After antiquity

The rationalizing of the oracle into an emblem of divine reason long outlived belief in the Pythia. Christian writers from the Church Fathers onward retold the silencing of the oracles as the retreat of the demons before Christ, and yet preserved the Sibylline and Apolline material as testimony; the Renaissance, recovering Plutarch and the Neoplatonists, made Apollo the patron of the arts and of poetic inspiration, the god of Parnassus, and the figure of enlightened reason — a role that carried into the iconography of European courts and academies and into the eighteenth century’s neoclassicism, with the Apollo Belvedere as its presiding image. The Apollonian/Dionysian polarity, drawn out in the nineteenth century, gave the god a second philosophical life as a principle of form and individuation. Modern revivals of polytheist practice in modern paganism have taken him up again, generally as a deity of art, clarity, healing, and self-knowledge rather than of the working oracle that once made him feared. Through every one of these reinventions the same shape holds. Apollo is the god of the line that divides — light from dark, the well from the sick, the one from the many, the form from the formless — and the Greeks kept the paradox at the center of him without resolving it: the healer who sent plague, the god of measure who could not be measured, the most native of their gods who came from somewhere else.

→ In the library: Plato — Apology (the Delphic oracle on Socrates) · Plato — Cratylus (Jowett; on the name of the gods) · G. R. S. Mead — The Chaldæan Oracles (1908; the Neoplatonic solar metaphysic)

→ Related: Amyclae · Divination · Ecstasy · Modern Paganism · Delphi · Artemis · Asclepius · Zeus · Dionysus · Daphne · Python · Prophecy · Neoplatonism · Theurgy · Chaldean Oracles Tradition