Killed the serpent guarding a Parnassian spring and took over its oracle
Python's name gave the Pythia her title and the Pythian Games their name.
Myth · Greek
Apollo
Greek mythology — Olympian, god of prophecy, music, healing and light
Apollo is the god of prophecy, music, poetry, archery, healing and plague — the same arrows that bring sickness can take it away. Son of Zeus and Leto and twin of Artemis, he was born on Delos and seized the oracle at Delphi by killing its serpent, Python. Through the Pythia he gave the most authoritative oracles in the Greek world, and the maxims carved at his sanctuary, "Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess", became the mottoes of Greek self-understanding.
How to spot them
- ▸Lyre or kithara, bow, laurel wreath and tripod; the raven, the dolphin and the palm
- ▸Epithets Phoebus ('bright'), Pythian, Smintheus and Musagetes, leader of the Muses
- ▸Twin of Artemis, born to Leto on the floating island of Delos
- ▸The Delphic maxims 'Know thyself' and 'Nothing in excess'
- ▸The one Olympian whose name the Romans did not change
Stories & episodes
Chased a nymph who was turned into a laurel tree as he caught her
Daphne's father, the river Peneus, transformed her; the laurel became his emblem.
Flayed a satyr alive after beating him in a music contest
Marsyas challenged the lyre with the aulos; Midas judged a related contest and got ass's ears.
Gave Cassandra true prophecy, then the curse that nobody would believe her
She had accepted the gift and refused him.
Killed a beloved Spartan youth with a wind-blown discus
From the blood of Hyacinthus sprang the flower; the Hyacinthia festival commemorated it.
Served a mortal king as herdsman for a year in penance for killing the Cyclopes
Admetus' kindness was repaid when the god won him a reprieve from death.
Shot plague-arrows into the Greek camp for nine days over a priest's dishonoured daughter
The quarrel over Chryseis that opens the Iliad.
Key ideas
- He embodies the Greek ideal of clarity, order and measure — what Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy called the Apollonian, set against the Dionysian
- Prophecy at Delphi came through the Pythia in a trance, and the god's oracles were famously ambiguous: Croesus was told that if he attacked Persia he would destroy a great empire, and destroyed his own
Quick-fire facts
- •Roman equivalent: Apollo — the only major Olympian to keep his Greek name in Rome, where Augustus made him a patron deity
- •Son of Zeus and Leto; twin brother of Artemis; born on Delos under a palm tree
- •Father of Asclepius, god of medicine, and of Orpheus in some accounts
- •His Delphic sanctuary held the omphalos, the stone marking the navel of the world, and the Pythian Games were held there every four years
- •Called Smintheus, 'mouse god', in the Iliad, where he brings plague on the Greeks
- •From the Hellenistic period he was increasingly identified with Helios, the sun
- •The Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Callimachus' Hymn 2 are the main hymnic sources; Ovid tells Daphne and Hyacinthus
- •The Belvedere Apollo in the Vatican was for centuries the most admired of all ancient statues
- •NASA's Apollo programme (1961–1972) was named for him by Abe Silverstein
- •The Delphic maxims were inscribed at the temple's forecourt; Socrates built his philosophy on the oracle's answer that no one was wiser than he
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Sources
- Aaron J. Atsma, the Theoi Project — Apollon
- Homeric Hymn to Apollo The birth on Delos and the founding of the Delphic oracle