Apollo

Fritz Graf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134372089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Fritz Graf here presents a survey of a god once thought of as the most powerful of gods, and capable of great wrath should he be crossed: Apollo the sun god.

From his first attestations in Homer, through the complex question of pre-Homeric Apollo, to the opposition between Apollo and Dionysos in nineteenth and twentieth-century thinking, Graf examines Greek religion and myth to provide a full account of Apollo in the ancient world.

For students of Greek religion and culture, of myth and legend, and in the fields of art and literature, Apollo will provide an informative and enlightening introduction to this powerful figure from the past.

KEY THEMES

1
APOLLO IN HOMER

THE GOD OF THE ILIAD

The Iliad, Homer’s poem on the anger of Achilles and its dire consequences, starts by invoking “the plan of Zeus” in order to explain the carnage and suffering its singer is about to narrate. But at this point, it is not Zeus who is holding center stage among the gods, it is Apollo, and his role is awe-inspiring and frightening, with no trace of the golden radiance that the classicism of our own time usually ascribes to him. The story, told to explain how it all came about, is familiar, but still worth retelling. At some point in the long siege of Troy, a certain Chryses, priest of Apollo at Chryse somewhere in the Troad, entered the Greek encampment, “carrying the sacred ribbons of Apollo Far-Shooter on his golden staff” (Il. 1.14f.). He wanted the return of his daughter, Chryseis, whom the Greeks had abducted during one of their raids along the coast, and he brought with him “immense ransom” (Il. 1.13). Agamemnon, the middle-aged commander-in-chief who had the girl in his tent and bed, rudely refused – a rash and unwise act by all accounts, as his army was well aware; Homer makes it very clear that the priest’s sacred status, not just the feelings of an elderly father, were violated. Brutally rebuked and frightened, the old man left, going “along the whispering surf line,” a pathetic image for all the fathers whose daughters have fallen easy prey to warriors, from Troy to Iraq and beyond. He did not go home along the beach, however, since Chryse is about twenty-five miles to the south, and he must have come by ship with his ransom: he needed the solitude of the lonely shore, and not only to grieve. Out of sight, he prayed to his god, Apollo Smintheus: “Let the Danaans [that is: the Greeks] pay for my tears with your arrows.” And Apollo reacted fast: “Down he went from Olympus’ peaks, fury in his heart, on his shoulder a bow and arrow case, and the arrows rattled on the shoulders of the angry god while he moved. And he arrived like the night.” At a distance from the Greek army, he sat down and began shooting his arrows into their encampment; the arrows brought illness and death, to dogs and mules first, then to the warriors. “And the corpses burnt in fire without ceasing.” After nine days of unmitigated horror, the Greeks consulted their seer, Calchas, and he revealed the reason for the deadly plague: “Because of his priest whom Agamemnon dishonored.” Agamemnon had to give in; Odysseus, the wily diplomat from the island of Ithaca, was dispatched to bring the girl back to her father, together with a lavish sacrifice for the god, a hecatomb, literally one hundred animals. The restitution was very formal: Odysseus handed her over to her father, the priest, at the altar of his god, Chryses prayed a second time to cancel his first prayer, the Greeks sacrificed their hundred sheep and filled the remainder of the day with yet another cult activity: “The entire day, the young men worshipped the god with song and dance, singing the paean, dancing for the Far-Shooter: he listened and enjoyed it.” They ended only at sunset, and they sailed home at night. And while they were away, Agamemnon had the army perform their own rites, purifying the encampment and offering “to Apollo a perfect hecatomb of oxen and sheep on the shore” (Il. 1.316).

It is the most detailed ritual sequence in the entire Iliad; only the description of Nestor’s sacrifice to Poseidon in the fifth book of the Odyssey comes close – and that description focuses on correct human interaction during a ritual, not on the god: the narrator of the Odyssey is interested in the social competence of his figures, not in any divine presence or ritual lore. Here, however, the god is at the very center, and this is emphasized from the start. It is none other than Apollo who is responsible for the fight between Agamemnon and Achilles that triggered the entire plot of the Iliad: “Who among the gods set them against each other in strife? Leto’s and Zeus’ son: angry at the king, he sent an illness over the army, an evil one” (Il. 1.8f.).

This initial role reflects Apollo’s prominence throughout the Iliad. He is a major player in the action of the poem, and with the exception of Zeus, no other god is mentioned as often as he is. He is the main protector of the Trojans; as such, he has his temple on the acropolis, the Pergamos, of Troy (Il. 5.446 and 7.83). He protects the walls of his city, and he constantly helps the main Trojan fighters – not only the archers Paris and Pandaros, but also Aeneas and, as long as he can, Hector, and he thwarts the attacks of the Greek heroes, Diomedes, Patroclus, and Achilles. Achilles will find his death at the hands of Paris and Phoebus Apollo, as he is well aware (Il. 22.359). When Patroclus, having become reckless, attacks the walls of Troy, Apollo protects them, standing on a high tower, and pushes Patroclus away (Il. 16.700ff.); some days later, when the other gods leave the battlefield for Olympus, he goes to the city in order to protect its walls (Il. 21.538ff.). When Diomedes stuns Aeneas and then wounds his mother Aphrodite who shielded her unconscious son from Diomedes’ attacks, Apollo takes over, drives Diomedes away and brings Aeneas to his temple; here Leto and Artemis, Apollo’s mother and sister, nurse the wounded hero (Il. 5.344ff.). When Hector challenges a Greek, he promises to hang his armor in Apollo’s temple, should he win (Il. 7.83), and his victory over Patroclus is decisively helped by the god (Il. 16.787ff.). He is no easy god to deal with: when Diomedes or Patroclus try to resist him, he pushes them back and finally threatens them with hard words, and he yells at Achilles when the hero does not recognize him immediately. It is no surprise that, in the funeral games for Patroclus, the archer Teukros loses the shooting contest because he failed to promise Apollo a hecatomb of young sheep (Il. 23.865). This lofty attitude, however, is reserved for his dealings with humans only: when his uncle Poseidon, a staunch supporter of the Greeks, challenges him to a fight, Apollo just shrugs: “Don’t tell me that I am crazy enough to fight you because of miserable mortals” (Il. 21.463). The younger god had too much respect for his uncle, or was too well brought up, to fight him.

His main opponent, during the Trojan War, is his sibling Athena. Over and over again, the two can be seen counteracting each other, and not just in battle. During the games for Patroclus, Diomedes, secure of his horsemanship, is leading in the chariot race when Apollo, still angry at him, throws the whip out of his hand; Athena, observing this, picks it up, hands it back, breaks the yoke of another chariot and helps him win (Il. 23.383). Their fierce opposition is all the more surprising as Athena too has her temple on the Trojan acropolis; but the one time we hear of it, when Hector ordered his mother to pray to the goddess and promise her a gift, she declined to help the Trojans (Il. 6.269–311).

Athena, of course, has her reasons for hating the Trojans, as has Hera with whom she conspires. Years ago, at the famous wedding of Achilles’ parents Peleus and Thetis, Eris, the goddess of dispute, promised a golden apple to the most beautiful goddess. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite fought over it, and the human judge whom they finally made decide their conflict voted for Aphrodite, the goddess of love, spurning wisdom and royalty, the bribes promised by Hera and Athena. The judge was Paris, son of Priam, king of Troy, and his abduction of Helen, the dazzlingly beautiful queen of Sparta with whom Aphrodite had bribed him, triggered the Trojan War: Helen, after all, was married to a prominent Greek king. Apollo, on the other hand, has no good reason for loving the Trojans or hating the Greeks. There is only one other story that connects Apollo with Troy: a generation ago, he and Poseidon had been servants of Priam’s father Laomedon for a year; Poseidon built Troy’s wall and Apollo guarded Laomedon’s cattle, or they both built the wall (Homer is somewhat inconsistent here). Laomedon, however, refused to pay his divine servants, instead he threatened them and chased them away. This still rankles with Poseidon and is the reason why he hates the Trojans (Il. 21.446–460, see also 7.452). If anything, the story makes Apollo’s strong and unique predilection for Troy even less understandable.

No surprise, then, that scholars tried to look for a reason outside the story of the Iliad, a reason that related to Apollo’s role in Greek cult. The answer they usually came up with was a historical one: Apollo originally was not Greek but Anatolian, and his origins in Asia Minor were still remembered when the Troy myth was formed: the god champions a city of his homeland. This answer, however, is not convincing. There is no doubt that the Iliad itself connects Apollo with Anatolia, more precisely with Lycia, a region in the southwest of Anatolia. The Trojans were helped by a large contingent of Lycian fighters that were led by Sarpedon and Glaukos (Il. 2.876f.); when wounded by an arrow, Glaukos prays to Apollo, “Lord who dwells in Lycia’s fat lands and in Troy,” and Apollo helps (Il. 16.514). Apollo has a sanctuary not only in Troy, but also in Lycia, and it is well known even today. The rich sanctuary of Leto near Xanthos, Lycia’s main city, was famous already in antiquity, and it is well excavated and researched; Apollo and Artemis, Leto’s children, have their place there as well. Homer also sometimes calls Apollo lykēgenés: ancient commentators (“scholiasts”) on Homer understood this as “born in Lycia,” modern linguists have their doubts, and they seem justified.

There is more. It is not just Apollo who protects the Trojans: Aphrodite and Ares do the same, although nobody would regard them as Anatolian divinities. Aphrodite has Oriental connections, since her main sanctuary was in Paphos on the island of Cyprus, but Cyprus is not Anatolia: the argument sounds like special pleading, and it cannot account for Ares whom Greeks could understand as a Thracian divinity, if they talked about ethnic origins of their gods at all. Even more seriously, explanations from hypothetical origins have run out of favor with scholars. It has become increasingly clear that it is not origins that matter but roles in stories and rituals. Often enough, tensions and oppositions that exist at the same time in a text or a ritual have been expressed by the Greeks as the result of a sequence in time and history: diachronical theories of origins served as a code for expressing synchronical tensions. Modern scholars, steeped in the historicism of the nineteenth century, however, took this seriously; by now, we have learned that such theories are mostly wrong. The best-known example is Dionysus, the god who brought carnevalesque disorder into Greek cities and disrupted the well-arranged and secure order of daily city life. Already fifth-century Athenians said that he had grown up in Anatolia; nineteenth-century scholars argued for an origin in Thrace (modern Bulgaria). Both theories run against historical facts: the god was already being worshipped in Bronze Age Crete.

Athena’s protection of the Greeks in the Iliad has been seen as part of a wider picture: Athena is the protectress of many Greek heroes. In the Iliad, she especially cherishes Achilles and Diomedes, in the Odyssey, Odysseus. In other stories, she protects Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, or Perseus, the slayer of many monsters; yet another protégé of hers is the mighty Heracles – on a relief from the temple of Zeus in Olympia, she even helps him carry the sky. This relationship has been explained from the role she plays as a protectress of the ephebes, the adolescent young men around the age of seventeen or eighteen: in most Greek cities, they served as the city’s frontier guards and standing army for a year, before becoming full citizens. The heroes are their mythical prototypes. Many heroes are young men who perform their main exploits before they reach adulthood and sometimes earn their role as adults (often kingship and a wife) through such exploits, such as Jason or Perseus: the heroes’ protectress is the ephebes’ protectress as well. Apollo has close ties with adolescent males as well, but these ties are very different. Only rarely is he said to be protector of a specific hero. Jason calls upon him when he sets out for his voyage and dedicates an altar to Apollo Embaterios (“He of the Embarkation”) who protects those who set out to the sea, and Heracles is said to have received his bow and arrows from Apollo. But Apollo does not protect them because he protects young men: he gave Heracles bow and arrows as the patron deity of archery, and Jason invoked him as the protector of passages in Greek cult. Apollo’s general connection with young men is more ambivalent. On the one hand, he protects the boys at the very moment when they turn into adults: together with the nymphs and the local rivers, he receives their hair when they cut it short as a sign of leaving their boyhood behind (Hesiod, Theogony 347). Achilles and Patroclus still were wearing their hair long (Il. 23.141), as does Apollo, the divine ephebe; and it is Apollo who protects Telemachus who is just coming of age in the main subplot of the Odyssey (Od. 19.86). But the same god is also responsible for the sudden death of young men, as is Artemis for the sudden death of young women. Telemachus, whom Apollo protects, could also become his victim: at least the suitors fervently wish that Apollo would kill him when they begin to perceive his growing independence (Od. 17.251). The suitors are young men at the age of military service; but their excess testosterone is not spent on campaign but in wild parties at the court of Odysseus, at the expense of his wife (or, in their reading, widow) Penelope. Penelope in turn, Odysseus’ faithful but harassed wife, wishes that Apollo would kill the most vicious among them, Antinous (Od. 17.494); Odysseus will oblige her by shooting Antinous first when he returns, as Homer describes in a masterfully detailed scene (Od. 22.8–21). In a myth narrated by old Priam, Niobe queen of Thebes mocked Leto, and her children took their revenge by shooting Niobe’s twelve children, Artemis the six girls, Apollo the six boys (Il. 24.602ff.). And when lamenting her dead son Hector, the Trojan queen Hecabe is struck that he does not look like someone killed in war, although his body has been cruelly maltreated by Achilles: rather, he looks “like one whom Apollo killed softly with his silver arrows” (Il. 24.578). It seems double-edged for a young warrior to be under the sign of Apollo; Athena’s protection is more robust. In this light, Apollo is the fitting god for the side that eventually will lose the war and whose main defender, Hector, dies in the course of the poem when Apollo has to leave his side.

ARCHER, KILLER AND HEALER

Homer’s dark image of the angry god, descending from Olympus with his bow and his quiver full of rattling arrows, sticks in one’s mind. Apollo is the archer, as his sister Artemis is the archeress, and they both kill. Artemis’ archery is usually confined to hunting: she is the mistress of animals, and killing animals is as much her business as nurturing them; today’s hunters are still aware of the intimate connection that exists between nurturing and killing. Apollo can be a protector of hunters as well, but not very often; his archery is the more deadly art of the warrior. The mighty hunter Orion is protected (and killed) by Artemis; Apollo gave his weapon to the Lycian Pandaros (Il. 2.827) and to Ajax’s brother Teukros (Il. 15.441), the two most accomplished archers on the Trojan and Greek side, and to Heracles who used archery to kill foes and monsters alike. Apollo will guide the hand of the archer Paris when Achilles is being killed, as he guided the arrow of the archer he loathes, the Greek Teukros, away from Hector (Il. 8.31). Human archers had better pray to him before they shoot: in the shooting contest during the funeral games for Patroclus, Meriones vows a hecatomb of sheep to the god while his opponent Teukros shoots without praying (Il. 23.865): this explains why Teukros missed despite being generally recognized as the better archer. One sees how divine intervention helps to save face: Teukros is a bad worshipper, not a bad archer. However, prayer and sacrifice do not always help. Before Penelope’s suitors began the shooting contest that would determine who would finally get to marry her, they decided to offer a goat to Apollo (Od. 21.265). This did not prevent them from failing: it is the unlikely contestant, Odysseus in the guise of a lowly beggar, to whom Apollo granted the fame of victory (Od. 21.338. 22,7).

But in the world of Greek warrior ideology, archery is a problematic affair. A fight with spear and sword is straightforward, involves direct physical contact and needs as much courage as it needs training. The hoplite, the warrior in heavy armor, is the ideal Greek fighter. Most heroes in myth and often in cult are such warriors, and to fight in full armor in the hoplites’ closed line is the task and the pride of the fully adult citizen. Archers have a special talent that others might lack, and they certainly need much training, but they are sneaky and cannot be trusted. The ambivalent Paris is an archer, a warrior who prefers the bedroom: “Back from the war? You should have died out there, beaten by a real hero, my former husband!” – thus Helen greets her abductor after Aphrodite whisked him out of battle (Il. 3.428f.). Wily Odysseus is perfectly capable of fighting in heavy armor, but the Odyssey makes him an archer too: deceit is as much Odysseus’ tactic as the straightforward attack. Another archer, the Trojan Pandaros, sabotages the armistice which Greeks and Trojans are about to conclude early in the Iliad by shooting at Menelaos. Athena had talked him into it: like the audience who wants action, she has no use for an armistice that would end the war, and the narration. He missed Menelaos, despite his prayer to Apollo, only because Athena deflected the arrow to a less important bystander; the damage was nevertheless done, and the fighting went on (Il. 3.88–147). In the reality of Greek warfare, archers were either ephebes or they were foreigners, Cretans or Lycians; adolescents were nearly as marginal in the Greek city as foreigners. Again, Apollo is rather ambivalent; the hoplite’s goddess is Athena, with helmet, breast armor and shield.

Apollo’s arrows are as deadly as they are stealthy; sudden and unexpected death is their doing – the arrow that suddenly strikes from afar is an apt image for a sudden epidemic whose results are as terrible as its causes are unexplained. Already in Bronze Age narrations of the Eastern Mediterranean, we hear that a god is spreading a plague with his arrows. Reshep, the god of plague in the pantheon of Bronze Age Syria, shoots his arrows to send the “fires of illness”; on Cyprus where he was worshipped as well, he was identified with Apollo. Echoes of the same idea persist even in the Old Testament. “I shall heap on them one disaster after another and expend my arrows on them: pangs of hunger, ravages of plague, and bitter pestilence” – these are God’s angry words to his people (Deuteronomy 32.23f.). The image has lost nothing of its threatening force.

But he who sends illness can also cure it. In the Iliad, healing is not the special province of Apollo, but nevertheless it is he who heals the plague. This comes about from the way the plague started: when a wrathful god is sending illness, placating him is the only successful cure. Homer’s Chryses makes the mechanism admirably clear. His first prayer (“let the Danaans pay for my tears with your arrows” 1.42) triggers the plague, his second (“keep now away the terrible plague from the Danaans” 1.456) stops it. In another instance, healing is a result of Apollo’s more general power as a god: when the Lycian Glaukos is wounded by an arrow of Teukros, he prays to his god Apollo, and the god immediately closes his wound and gives him his strength back. Neither makes Apollo a specialized healer. There are specialists for healing in the Iliad, both among mortals and among the gods. The Greek army has two heroic physicians in their ranks...