Apollo

← Encyclopedia

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.

The reach of his cult was wide and the roles only loosely consistent. He presided over music and the lyre, over the healing arts later inherited by his son Asclepius, and over plague, which the same arrows that healed could send; the Iliad opens with Apollo striding down from Olympus to loose disease on the Greek camp. He was a god of young men, of colonists setting out for new cities, and of the moral demands a person makes on himself — the maxims know thyself and nothing in excess were carved at his chief sanctuary. Above all he was the god who spoke. At Delphi, on the slope of Parnassus, a priestess called the Pythia delivered his answers, and the Greeks treated the place as the navel of the world; oracles at Didyma, Claros, and elsewhere extended the same authority. What the oracle declared, tradition held, was not the Pythia’s own mind but the god’s, and behind the god the will of Zeus.

Where the figure originated is genuinely uncertain. The name has no secure Greek etymology, and scholars have argued in turn for Anatolian, Dorian, and northern roots; the matter remains open. What can be established is the density of his worship from the eighth century BCE onward, and the political weight his oracles carried — Delphi advised on wars, laws, and the founding of colonies across the Greek world, and was rich and consulted enough to function as something close to a Panhellenic institution.

In later thought Apollo drifted toward the abstract. Philosophers fond of etymology read his name as a-pollon, “not many,” and made him a figure of unity and of the sun; the Neoplatonists folded the Delphic god into their own metaphysics of light and ascent, and the rationalising of the oracle into an emblem of divine reason long outlived belief in the Pythia. Modern revivals of polytheist practice have taken him up again, generally as a deity of art, clarity, and self-knowledge rather than of the working oracle that once made him feared. The healer who sent plague, the god of measure who could not be measured himself — the Greeks kept both, and did not try to smooth them into one.

→ In the library: Plato — Apology (the Delphic oracle on Socrates)

→ Related: Amyclae · Divination · Ecstasy · Modern Paganism