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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter IV: The Olympian Gods

Apollo and Artemis: The Divine Twins of Greek Mythology

Apollo and Artemis, twin children of Zeus and Leto: their birth on Delos, Apollo's Delphi, music and healing, Artemis the huntress, and their famous myths.

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Apollo and Artemis were the twin children of Zeus and the Titaness Leto, born on the island of Delos. Apollo was the god of prophecy, music, healing and plague, purification and youthful male beauty, worshipped above all at his oracle of Delphi; Artemis was the virgin huntress, mistress of wild animals and protector of girls and of women in childbirth. Both carried the bow, and in myth they often act together, sending sudden death with their arrows, defending their mother's honour and punishing those who offended them.

The Birth of the Twins on Delos§

According to Hesiod, Leto was one of the wives of Zeus before Hera, but most tellings make her a rival who suffered Hera's anger. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, probably composed in the seventh or sixth century BCE and joined from a Delian and a Pythian part, tells how the pregnant Leto wandered from land to land, and none dared to receive the god who would be born. Only Delos, a small rocky island, accepted her once Leto swore that Apollo would build his first temple there. For nine days and nights she was in labour, because Hera kept Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, away on Olympus; the other goddesses bribed Iris with a great necklace to fetch her, and Leto, clasping a palm tree, gave birth to Apollo.

Later sources add variants. Pindar and Callimachus, in his Hymn to Delos (third century BCE), say that Delos had been a floating island that was fixed in place for the birth. Apollodorus says that Artemis was born first, on Ortygia, and helped her mother deliver her brother; Ortygia was sometimes identified with Delos itself. Delos became a great panhellenic sanctuary, and the Athenians twice purified it, removing graves and forbidding births and deaths on the island.

Apollo at Delphi: Oracle, Purification and Healing§

The second part of the Homeric Hymn describes how Apollo travelled through Greece seeking a site for his oracle and chose a place beneath Mount Parnassus. There he shot a monstrous she-dragon, and the rotting (pythein) of its body gave the place the name Pytho and the god the epithet Pythian; later writers call the serpent Python. Taking the form of a dolphin, Apollo led a Cretan ship to the nearby shore to become his priests, and so he was also called Delphinios. The workings of the oracle and its priestess are described in the Oracle of Delphi and the Pythia.

Apollo was a god of purification. Having shed blood, he himself had to be cleansed, and in some versions he served a mortal for a period of exile. He served King Admetus of Pherae as a herdsman after killing the Cyclopes, who had forged the thunderbolt that killed his son, the healer Asclepius, and he and Poseidon built the walls of Troy for King Laomedon. At Delphi he cleansed Orestes of matricide. As a healer he was invoked as Paian, a name perhaps already found as pa-ja-wo on a Knossos tablet, and the paean became a hymn of thanks and of war. Yet the same god sent disease: the Iliad opens with Apollo's arrows bringing plague on the Greek camp for nine days because Agamemnon had insulted his priest Chryses.

His festivals included the Spartan Hyakinthia and Karneia and the Athenian Thargelia, at which, by ancient report, two human scapegoats were led out of the city in a rite of purification. The origin of the god himself is debated: proposals range from Anatolia to the Dorian assemblies called apellai, and none is certain.

The God of Music, the Muses and the Lyre§

Apollo was the leader of the Muses (Musagetes) and the god of the lyre, which according to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes was invented by his baby brother Hermes and given to him in exchange for stolen cattle. The god's music could not be bettered, and myth punished those who tried. The satyr Marsyas, who had taken up the pipes discarded by Athena, challenged Apollo and lost, and the god flayed him alive; when King Midas preferred the music of Pan, Apollo gave him the ears of an ass. These stories, retold by Ovid, were later read as allegories of the triumph of harmonious reason over passion.

Apollo's loves usually ended badly, though the outcome varies by source. Daphne, fleeing his pursuit, was turned into a laurel tree, which became his sacred plant and the crown of victors at the Pythian Games, as Ovid tells it in the first book of the Metamorphoses (8 CE). The Spartan youth Hyacinthus was killed by a discus and became the flower that bears his name. Coronis, unfaithful while pregnant with Asclepius, was shot by Artemis or Apollo, and Cassandra, who refused him, received the gift of prophecy along with the curse that no one would believe her.

Artemis: Mistress of Wild Animals§

In the Iliad, Hera mocks Artemis as a "lion to women", since Zeus has allowed her to kill whom she pleases, and calls her Potnia Theron, Mistress of Wild Animals, an old title that recalls Bronze Age images of a goddess flanked by beasts. Callimachus's Hymn to Artemis imagines the little girl on her father's knee asking for eternal virginity, a bow and arrows, a band of nymphs as companions, and all the mountains as her own. She roamed the hills and woods with her nymphs, and she was honoured with the epithet Agrotera, the huntress, to whom Athenians sacrificed goats in thanks for Marathon.

Her cults were concerned above all with transitions. At Brauron in Attica young girls served her as "bears" (arktoi) in a rite before marriage, and inscriptions list the garments that women dedicated to her there; Euripides says that Iphigenia, buried at Brauron, received the clothes of women who died in labour. As Lochia she helped women in labour, though her arrows could also bring sudden death to women. At Sparta, the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia became notorious in the Roman period for the ritual whipping of boys at her altar. In Asia Minor, the vast temple of Artemis of Ephesus, burned by Herostratus in 356 BCE and rebuilt on a grand scale, was counted among the Seven Wonders, and her cult image, hung with egg-shaped forms whose meaning is still debated, shows how much local tradition the Greek name could cover.

Myths of the Huntress§

The best-known stories show Artemis guarding her purity and her prerogatives. The hunter Actaeon saw her bathing and was turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds, in Ovid's version for an accidental glimpse; earlier sources give other reasons, including rivalry with Zeus for Semele. The nymph Callisto, one of her companions, was seduced by Zeus and turned into a bear, by Artemis, Hera or Zeus himself according to different authors. The giant hunter Orion died by her arrows or by a scorpion she sent, and became a constellation.

When Agamemnon, gathering the fleet for the Trojan War, killed a deer in her sacred grove, or boasted that he was a better hunter, Artemis held back the winds at Aulis until he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. In Aeschylus the sacrifice is carried out; in other versions, followed by Euripides, the goddess substitutes a deer and carries Iphigenia away to serve her among the Taurians. Together the twins killed the children of Niobe, who had boasted that she had more children than Leto: Apollo shot the sons and Artemis the daughters, a story already known to Homer. In Euripides' Hippolytus (428 BCE), the young huntsman devoted to Artemis and contemptuous of Aphrodite is destroyed by the goddess of love, and Artemis can only promise him a cult.

Sun and Moon: Later Identifications and Legacy§

Homer's Apollo is not the Sun, which is the separate god Helios, and Artemis is not the Moon, which is Selene. The identification of Apollo with the Sun appears in some philosophical and literary sources from the fifth century BCE and became common in Hellenistic and Roman times, as did that of Artemis with Selene and with Hecate. The Romans adopted Apollo under his Greek name, and Augustus built him a temple on the Palatine, while Artemis was identified with the Italian Diana.

Apollo became for later Europe the ideal of luminous order, and the Apollo Belvedere was admired by Winckelmann as the summit of ancient art. Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) contrasted the Apollonian principle of form and measure with the Dionysian principle of ecstasy, a pairing explored in Dionysus and the Bacchae. The twins' family is traced in Zeus, king of the gods, and their worship within Greek religion in Greek religion and the mysteries.

Frequently asked questions§

Are Apollo and Artemis twins?§

Yes, in most ancient sources they are twins, children of Zeus and Leto. Some traditions place their births on different islands or days, Artemis on Ortygia and Apollo on Delos, with Artemis born first.

Was Apollo the god of the sun?§

Not originally. In Homer and Hesiod the Sun is the god Helios; Apollo's association with the Sun grew from the fifth century BCE and became standard in Roman and later culture, which is why he is now often called a sun god.

Why is Artemis a virgin goddess?§

Myth presents her virginity as her own choice, granted by Zeus. In cult it placed her outside marriage and the household, in the wild, which made her the natural guardian of girls before marriage and of the dangerous passage of childbirth.

Sources and further reading§