Apollo
Whether or not Apollo is, as is sometimes romantically said, ‘‘the most Greek of all the
gods,’’ he is certainly a remarkable and ambitious construct. Depicted as a youth, with
‘‘uncut hair’’ (Iliad20.39), he is like Achilles, who is keeping his hair long, ready to cut
it, in a passage rite, for the river Spercheius. Apollo is thus a guardian of youth at the
moment of transition to full adulthood. Yet he is also the god that kills Achilles, just as
Artemis is responsible for the death by sacrifice of Iphigeneia (unless she saves her) and
is also in some versions responsible for the death and transformation of Callisto. And
just as we can find a figure Artemis Iphigeneia, so we can find Apollo identified with
another dead youth as Apollo Hyacinthus (Farnell 1896–1909:4.125). In this envir-
onment Apollo seems to have a key role in the definition of society. This role is found
even more strongly when his cult, as we have seen, turns out to be the central cult of
the assembled Aetolians at Thermon, and theapellafrom which his name might derive.
Similarly, the cult of Apollo Karneios is so fundamental to Dorian Greeks that Thu-
cydides even calls the late summer month Karneios, in which the festival, the Karneia,
was held, a ‘‘sacred month of the Dorians’’ (Thucydides 5.54.2; so too Pausanias
3.13.4; cf. Nilsson 1906:118–20). Indeed, it was precisely because the Spartans were
engaged in the Karneia that they could not come to help the Athenians against the
Persians at Marathon (490 BC; Herodotus 6.106), or send Leonidas sufficient forces in
time at Thermopylai (480 BC; Herodotus 7.206). The epithet Karneios was said to be
derived fromkraneia, a ‘‘cornel-tree,’’ but it is usually thought that Apollo has merged
with himself an earlier god Karnos.
The gods are constantly depicted as sexual predators. However, in the case of gods
sex always leads to children and the purpose of the myth is usually to inscribe an
ancestry in myth. Pindar sings how Evadne lived by the river Alpheius:
Reared there, she first touched sweet
Aphrodite at the hands of Apollo.
Olympian6.35Her mortal father is Aepytus, though really her father was the god Poseidon. He now
proceeds to Delphi to ask the oracle (of Apollo!) who is the father of Evadne’s child.
Meanwhile Apollo sends Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, and the Fates (Moirai) to
ease the birth. Aepytus, returning, announces that the father is indeed Apollo and
that the child ‘‘would be the most outstanding seer to human beings.’’ And so it
turns out, for the child, Iamus, is the founder of a major clan of prophets, the Iamids,
at Olympia. The divine intrudes in this way into the world of men: the mysteries of
sex and the survival of birth-pangs reflect divine forces; the oracle provides answers to
the problems mortal vision cannot on its own resolve; the god bestows, or originates,
the gift of prophecy, a gift which reaches into the present day. Myth accounts for the
presence of seers today, but it says something about the nature of prophecy too. Local
myth builds on the existing portrait of the god in order to add to it.
Apollo may also be a god of plague, striking men down with his arrows – inIliad 1
or in theOedipus the Kingof Sophocles. This seems to be what he is when he is called
Olympian Gods, Olympian Pantheon 49