Apollo

The island that asked for a promise

Leto was carrying the child of Zeus, and she crossed the Aegean Sea in labour. No land would take the child. When she reached the island of Delos, she was honest about what it had to gain. Its soil would never make it rich in cattle, sheep, grain or wine. A sanctuary, a sacred place set aside for a god, could bring worshippers instead, and their sacrifices would keep the islanders alive.

Delos listened and worried about the god. What if Apollo saw the rocky ground, scorned it and pushed the island under the sea? The island asked Leto for the strongest promise she could give. She swore by Earth, by Heaven and by the water of Styx, the oath the gods held most binding. Apollo would build his first temple and oracle on Delos and honour it above other places. An oracle is a place where people come to hear a god’s answers.

Only after the oath did the birth go ahead. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early poem in his honour, his birthplace is a bargain. Leto needed ground, Delos needed a future, and each gained something before the god appeared.

Nine days of labour

Leto laboured for nine days and nine nights beside a palm tree near Mount Kynthos, the hill on Delos. Goddesses gathered round her. But the goddess Hera had kept Eileithyia, the goddess who eases childbirth, on Olympus without telling her. The other goddesses sent Iris, the messenger of the gods, to fetch her and promised her a great necklace. As soon as Eileithyia reached Delos, Apollo was born.

People on Delos remembered the new god as a founder from his first days. A local tradition says that Apollo built his first altar from the horns of goats that his sister Artemis had hunted on Kynthos. This Horned Altar made Leto’s promise real. Poor ground became sacred ground, and ships came to the island for Apollo’s festivals.

How Apollo took Delphi

His second great sanctuary began very differently. Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, says the goddess Themis was already giving oracles at Delphi when Apollo arrived. Python, the serpent that guarded the place, tried to stop him. Apollo killed it and took over the oracle.

This short account does not let prophecy belong to Apollo simply from birth. Delos let him in after an oath. Delphi already had an owner and a guardian. He won one sanctuary by a promise and the other by killing the one who held it before him. Both stories show a god building his authority, where he might simply have found places ready for him.

The temple sculpture kept his arrival in view. The pediment is the carved triangle under the roof at each end of a temple. On the east pediment of the earlier temple, built in what is called the Archaic period, Apollo arrived at Delphi with his mother Leto and with Artemis. That building was finished around 510 BC and fell in an earthquake in 373 BC. On the temple that replaced it, Apollo and the Muses filled the east pediment. Dionysus appeared in the west pediment with the Thyiads, the women who followed him.

A temple shared with Dionysus

Apollo was a strong presence at Delphi, yet he was not always there. Delphic tradition held that he left for three months each winter. He went to the Hyperboreans, a distant people. While he was away, the god Dionysus ruled the sanctuary, and his tomb was said to lie inside Apollo’s temple.

This complicates any simple picture of Apollo as the only owner. He won the oracle from Python, yet the year still held his absence and another god’s season. Inside the temple, his statue and the omphalos, a sacred stone, stood together in the inner room. The Pythia, who gave the oracle’s answers, spoke from a closed space below. The centre of his prophecy was carefully ordered, and its calendar admitted that he was sometimes away.

Order and danger

Apollo’s other powers carry the same mix of clear order and danger. His music, healing and prophecy can bring order to the world. His arrows bring sudden punishment.

The stories of his two great sanctuaries follow the same pattern. On Delos, Leto must guarantee that her son will honour a weak and rocky island. At Delphi, Apollo becomes the keeper of divine knowledge only after he kills the creature that guarded it. Neither place shows his authority arriving without effort. Each tells how he gained it, and what had to be promised, or pushed aside, before it could last.