Leto

The island that makes her promise

Leto is pregnant by Zeus with twins, Artemis and Apollo, and she needs a place to give birth. The two main tellings of her search differ.

Apollodorus, who retold the myths in a book called the Library, tells it as a chase. The goddess Hera drives Leto across the earth, and Delos alone takes her in. Artemis is born first. She then acts as midwife when Leto gives birth to Apollo.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early poem in praise of the god, tells it as a bargain. Leto asks the island of Delos to take her in. The island is poor and rocky. It is afraid that Apollo will reject it once he is born. It agrees only when Leto swears by Earth, Heaven and the river Styx that her son will build his first temple there. In the hymn the birth waits for Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth. Her late arrival, not help from Artemis, lets Apollo be born.

In the hymn, shelter comes with conditions. Leto needs a place to give birth. Delos needs lasting honour and the gifts that worshippers bring. Their oath gives each what the other can supply, before Apollo has drawn his first breath. The two accounts agree on the island and the twins, and differ on how the birth happens.

How much power does the gentlest goddess hold?

The early Greek poet Hesiod calls Leto dark-robed and the gentlest of the gods. She is a daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe and a sister of Asteria. The Theogony, his poem on the origins of the gods, describes her in a few kind words. It gives no scene in which she uses force.

The Homeric Hymn gives one such scene on Olympus, the home of the gods. Apollo enters the hall of Zeus with his bow bent, and the gods jump up from their seats. Leto stays beside Zeus. She unstrings the bow and closes the quiver. She takes the arrows from Apollo’s shoulders and hangs them on a golden peg. Zeus then gives his son nectar, the drink of the gods, and a seat.

Leto does not order the gathering about or defeat Apollo. She is the one who can disarm him without a fight. Her power in the scene comes from her closeness to the dangerous son the others fear.

When an insult reaches the children

Niobe, a mortal mother, boasts that she is better than Leto, because she has 12 children and Leto only two. In the Iliad, the hero Achilles tells this story to Priam, the king of Troy. Apollo kills Niobe’s six sons and Artemis kills her six daughters. The bodies lie unburied for nine days, because Zeus has turned the people around them to stone. On the tenth day the gods bury them.

The punishment comes from the very children Niobe mocked for being few. Leto does not raise a weapon herself. As a mother, though, she has two archers to answer for her, and their answer is total. The story shows the hard side of the honour behind Hesiod’s word “gentle”: a mild goddess is still not safe to belittle.

Achilles tells the story to a father grieving for his son Hector. His point is that even Niobe ate again after her children died. But the example also keeps her suffering in view, beside Leto’s victory. The gods could not restore the insulted mother’s honour without destroying another mother’s family.

A sanctuary of her own on Delos

Delos honoured Leto in a place of her own, apart from her children’s. A marble temple, dated to about 550 BC, stood between Apollo’s sanctuary and the Sacred Lake. It stood inside a larger Temenos of Leto. A temenos is a sacred enclosure, and this one once held several buildings.

By the Hellenistic period, a later stage of Greek history, private offerings to Leto had become rare. This was at a time when people from across the Mediterranean came to worship on Delos. She stayed important through the island’s founding story and the fame of Apollo and Artemis, while direct worship of her shrank.

The temple’s position kept each figure in place. Leto had won Delos for the births. Apollo ruled the sanctuary, and Artemis had her own honours. But the mother also held walled ground under her own name. The island that once demanded her oath later gave marble and space to the goddess who made the promise.