Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 20

Orec., p. 100. It is also conjectured that the snake is only the sacred serpent of the older oracle of the earth on the same site. aeschylus, _Eumenides_, 2.

The monster is the fosterling of Hera in the Homeric hymn, and the bane of flocks and herds. She is somehow connected with the fable of the birth of the monster Typhoeus, son of Hera without a father. The Homeric hymn derives _Pythius_, the name of the G.o.d, from (------), "rot," the disdainful speech of Apollo to the dead monster, "for there the pest rotted away beneath the beams of the sun". The derivation is a _volks-etymologie_. It is not clear whether the poet connected in his mind the sun and the G.o.d. The local legend of the dragon-slaying was kept alive in men's minds at Delphi by a mystery-play, in which the encounter was represented in action. In one version of the myth the slavery of Apollo in the house of Admetus was an expiation of the dragon's death.* Through many of the versions runs the idea that the slaying of the serpent was a deed which required purification and almost apology. If the serpent was really the deity of an elder faith, this would be intelligible, or, if he had kinsfolk, a serpent-tribe in the district, we could understand it. Apollo's next act was to open a new spring of water, as the local nymph was hostile and grudged him her own.

This was an inexplicable deed in a sun G.o.d, whose business it is to dry up rather than to open water-springs. He gave oracles out of the laurel of Delphi, as Zeus out of the oaks of Dodona.** Presently Apollo changed himself into a huge dolphin, and in this guise approached a s.h.i.+p of the Cretan mariners.*** He guided, in his dolphin shape, the vessel to Crisa, the port of Delphi, and then emerged splendid from the waters, and filled his fane with light, a sun-G.o.d indeed Next, a.s.suming the shape of a man, he revealed himself to the Cretans, and bade them wors.h.i.+p him in his _Delphic_ seat as Apollo Delphinios, the Dolphin-Apollo.

* Eurip., Alcestis, Schol., line 1.

** Hymn, 215.

*** Op. cit., 220-225.

Such is the ancient tale of the founding of the Delphic oracle, in which G.o.ds, and beasts, and men are mixed in archaic fas.h.i.+on. It is open to students to regard the dolphin as only one of the many animals whose earlier wors.h.i.+p is concentrated in Apollo, or to take the creature for the symbol of spring, when seafaring becomes easier to mortals, or to interpret the dolphin as the result of a _volks-etymologie_, in which the name Delphi (meaning originally a hollow in the hills) was connected with _delphis_, the dolphin.*

On the whole, it seems impossible to get a clear view of Apollo as a sun-G.o.d from a legend built out of so many varied materials of different dates as the myth of the slaying of the Python and the founding of the Delphic oracle. Nor does the tale of the birth of the G.o.d--_les enfances Apollon_--yield much more certain information. The most accessible and the oldest form of the birth-myth is preserved in the Homeric hymn to the Delian Apollo, a hymn intended for recital at the Delian festival of the Ionian people.

The hymn begins without any account of the amours of Zeus and Leto; it is merely said that many lands refused to allow Leto a place wherein to bring forth her offspring. But barren Delos listened to her prayer, and for nine days Leto was in labour, surrounded by all the G.o.ddesses, save jealous Hera and Eilithyia, who presides over child-birth. To her Iris went with the promise of a golden necklet set with amber studs, and Eilithyia came down to the isle, and Leto, grasping the trunk of a palm tree, brought forth Apollo and Artemis.**

Such is the narrative of the hymn, in which some interpreters, such as M. Decharme, find a rich allegory of the birth of Light. Leto is regarded as Night or Darkness, though it is now admitted that this meaning cannot be found in the etymology of her name.***

* Roscher, Lexikon; Preller, i. 208; Schol. ad Lycophr., v.

208.

** Compare Theognis, 5-10.

*** Preller, i. 190, note 4; Curtius, Gr. ae, 120.

M. Decharme presumes that the palm tree (------) originally meant the morning red, by aid of which night gives birth to the sun, and if the poet says the young G.o.d loves the mountain tops, why, so does the star of day. The moon, however, does not usually arise simultaneously with the dawn, as Artemis was born with Apollo. It is vain, in fact, to look for minute touches of solar myth in the tale, which rests on the womanly jealousy of Hera, and explains the existence of a great fane and feast of Apollo, not in one of the rich countries that refused his mother sanctuary, but in a small barren and remote island.*

Among the wilder myths which grouped themselves round the figure of Apollo was the fable that his mother Leto was changed into a wolf. The fable ran that Leto, in the shape of a wolf, came in twelve days from the Hyperboreans to Delos.** This may be explained as a _volks-etymologie_ from the G.o.d's name, "Lycegenes," which is generally held to mean "born of light". But the presence of very many animals in the Apollo legend and in his temples, corresponding as it does to similar facts already observed in the religion of the lower races, can scarcely be due to popular etymologies alone. The Dolphin-Apollo has already been remarked.

* The French excavators in Delos found the original unhewn stone on which, in later days, the statue of the anthropomorphic G.o.d was based.

** Aristotle, Hist. An., vi 86; Elian., N. A., iv. 4; Schol. on Apol. Rhod., ii. 12

There are many traces of connection between Apollo and the wolf.

In Athens there was the Lyceum of Apollo Lukios, Wolf-Apollo, which tradition connected with the primeval strife wherein aegeus (goat-man) defeated Lukios (wolfman). The Lukian Apollo was the deity of the defeated side, as Athene of the aegis (goat-skin) was the deity of the victors.* The Argives had an Apollo of the same kind, and the wolf was stamped on their coins.** According to Pausanias, when Danaus came seeking the kings.h.i.+p of Argos, the people hesitated between him and Gelanor. While they were in doubt, a wolf attacked a bull, and the Argives determined that the bull should stand for Gelanor, the wolf for Danaus. The wolf won; Danaus was made king, and in grat.i.tude raised an altar to _Apollo Lukios_, Wolf-Apollo. That is (as friends of the totemic system would argue), a man of the wolf-stock dedicated a shrine to the wolf-G.o.d.*** In Delphi the presence of a bronze image of a wolf was explained by the story that a wolf once revealed the place where stolen temple treasures were concealed. The G.o.d's beast looked after the G.o.d's interest.**** In many myths the children of Apollo by mortal girls were exposed, but fostered by wolves.***** In direct contradiction with Pausanias, but in accordance with a common rule of mythical interpretation, Sophocles****** calls Apollo "the wolf-slayer".

* Paus., i. 19, 4.

** Preller, i. 202, note 3; Paus., ii. 19, 3.

*** Encyc. Brit., s. v. "Sacrifice".

**** Paus., x. 14, 4.

***** Ant. Lib., 30.

****** _Electra_, 6., 222

It has very frequently happened that when animals were found closely connected with a G.o.d, the ancients explained the fact indifferently by calling the deity the protector or the destroyer of the beasts in question. Thus, in the case of Apollo, mice were held sacred and were fed in his temples in the Troad and elsewhere, the people of Hamaxitus especially wors.h.i.+pping mice.* The G.o.d's name, Smintheus, was understood to mean "Apollo of the Mouse," or "Mouse-Apollo ".** But while Apollo was thus at some places regarded as the patron of mice, other narratives declared that he was adored as Sminthian because from mice he had freed the country. This would be a perfectly natural explanation if the vermin which had once been sacred became a pest in the eyes of later generations.***

Flies were in this manner connected with the services of Apollo. It has already been remarked that an ox was sacrificed to flies near the temple of Apollo in Leucas. The sacrifice was explained as a device for inducing flies to settle in one spot, and leave the rest of the coast clear. This was an expensive, and would prove a futile arrangement.

There was a statue of the Locust-Apollo (Parnopios) in Athena The story ran that it was dedicated after the G.o.d had banished a plague of locusts.****

* aelian, H. A., xii. 6.

** Strabo, xiii. 604.

*** It is the explanation Preller gives of the Mouse-Apollo, i. 202.

**** Paus., i. 24, 8; Strabo, xiii. 912.

A most interesting view of the way in which pious heathens of a late age regarded Apollo's menagerie may be got from Plutarch's essay on the Delphic responses. It is the description of a visit to Delphi. In the hall of the Corinthians the writer and his friends examine the sacred palm tree of bronze, and "the snakes and frogs in relief round the root of the tree". "Why," said they, "the palm tree is not a marsh plant, and frogs are not a Corinthian crest." And indeed one would think ravens and swans, and hawks and wolves, and anything else than these reptiles would be agreeable to the G.o.d. Then one of the visitors, Serapion, very learnedly showed that Apollo was the sun, and that the sun arises from water. "Still slipping into the story your lightings up and your exhalations," cried Plutarch, and chaffed him, as one might chaff Kuhn, or Schwartz, or Decharme, about his elemental interpretations. In fact, the cla.s.sical writers knew rather less than we do about the origin of many of their religious peculiarities.

In connection with sheep, again, Apollo was wors.h.i.+pped as the ram Apollo.* At the festival of the Carneia a ram was his victim.** These facts are commonly interpreted as significant of the G.o.d's care for shepherds and the pastoral life, a memory of the days when Apollo kept a mortal's sheep and was the hind of Admetus of Thessaly. He had animal names derived from sheep and goats, such as _Maloeis Tragios_.*** The tale which made Apollo the serf and shepherd of mortal men is as old as the _Iliad_,**** and is not easy to interpret, whether as a nature-myth or a local legend. Laomedon, one of Apollo's masters, not only refused him his wage, but threatened to put him in chains and sell him to foreign folk across the sea, and to crop his ears with the blade of bronze. These legends may have brought some consolation to the hearts of free men enslaved. A G.o.d had borne like calamities, and could feel for their affliction.

* Karneios, from (Heyschius, s.v.), a ram.

** Theocritus, Idyll, v. 8a

*** Preller, i. 215, note 1.

**** ii. 766. xxi. 448.

To return to the beasts of Apollo, in addition to dolphins, mice, rams and wolves, he was constantly a.s.sociated with lizards (powerful totems in Australia), cicalas, hawks, swans, ravens, crows, vultures, all of which are, by mythologists, regarded as symbols of the sun-G.o.d, in one or other capacity or function. In the _Iliad_,* Apollo puts on the gear of a hawk, and flits on hawk's wings down Ida, as the Thlinkeet Yehl does on the feathers of a crane or a raven.

* xv. 287.

The loves of Apollo make up a long and romantic chapter in his legend.

They cannot all be so readily explained, as are many of the loves of Zeus, by the desire to trace genealogical pedigrees to a G.o.d. It is on this principle, however, that the birth of Ion, for example, is to be interpreted. The ideal eponymous hero of the Ionian race was naturally feigned to be the son of the deity by whose fatherhood all Ionians became "brethren in Apollo". Once more, when a profession like that of medicine was in the hands of a clan conceiving themselves to be of one blood, and when their common business was under the protection of Apollo, they inevitably traced their genealogy to the G.o.d. Thus the medical clan of the Asclepiadae, of which Aristotle was a member, derived their origin from Asclepius or (as the Romans called him) aesculapius.

So far everything in this myth appears natural and rational, granting the belief in the amours of an anthropomorphic G.o.d. But the details of the story are full of that _irrational_ element which is said to "make mythology mythological". In the third Pythian ode Pindar sings how Apollo was the lover of Coronis; how she was faithless to him with a stranger. Pindar does not tell how the crow or the raven flew to Apollo with the news, and how the G.o.d cursed the crow, which had previously been white, that it should for ever be black. Then he called his sister, Artemis, to slay the false nymph, but s.n.a.t.c.hed from her funeral pyre the babe Asclepius, his own begotten. This myth, which explains the colour of the crow as the result of an event and a divine curse, is an example of the stage of thought already ill.u.s.trated in the Namaqua myth of Heitsi Eibib, and the peculiarities which his curse attached to various animals. There is also a Bushman myth according to which certain blackbirds have white b.r.e.a.s.t.s, because some women once tied pieces of white fat round their necks.* It is instructive to observe, as the Scholiast on Pindar quotes Artemon, that Pindar omits the incident of the crow as foolish and unworthy. Apollo, according to the ode, was himself aware, in his omniscience, of the frailty of Coronis. But Hesiod, a much earlier poet, tells the story in the usual way, with the curse of the crow, and his consequent change of colour.** The whole story, in its most ancient shape, and with the omissions suggested by the piety of a later age, is an excellent example of the irrational element in Greek myth, of its resemblance to savage myth, and of the tendency of more advanced thought to veil or leave out features revolting to pure religion.***

* Bleek, _Bushman Folk-Lore_; Pindar, _Pyth_., iii, with notes of the Scholiast.

** Pindar, Estienne, Geneva, 1599, p. 219.

*** For the various genealogies of Asclepius and a discussion of the authenticity of the Hesiodic fragments, see Roscher, _Lexikon_, pp. 615, 616.

The connection of Asclepius with the serpent was so close that he was received into Roman religion in the form of a living snake, while dogs were so intimately connected with his wors.h.i.+p that Panofka believed him to have been originally a dog-G.o.d (Roscher, p. 629, _Revue Archeohgique_). In another myth Apollo succeeds to the paternal honours of a totem. The Telmissians in Lycia claimed descent from Telmessus, who was the child of an amour in which Apollo a.s.sumed the form of a dog. "In this guise he lay with a daughter of Antenor." Probably the Lycians of Telmissus originally derived their pedigree from a dog, _sans phrase_ and, later, made out that the dog was Apollo metamorphosed. This process of veiling a totem, and explaining him away as a saint of the same name, is common in modern India.*

* Suidas, His authority is Dionysius of Chalcis 200 BC, See "Primitive Marriage in Bengal," Asiatic Quarterly, June, 1886.

The other loves of Apollo are numerous, but it may be sufficient to have examined one such story in detail. Where the tale of the amour was not a necessary consequence of the genealogical tendency to connect clans with G.o.ds, it was probably, as Roscher observes in the case of Daphne, an aetiological myth. Many flowers and trees, for example, were nearly connected with the wors.h.i.+p and ritual of Apollo; among these were notably the laurel, cypress and hyacinth. It is no longer possible to do more than conjecture why each of these plants was thus favoured, though it is a plausible guess that the G.o.d attracted into his service various local tree-wors.h.i.+ps and plant-wors.h.i.+ps. People would ask why the deity was a.s.sociated with the flowers and boughs, and the answer would be readily developed on the familiar lines of nature-myth. The laurel is dear to the G.o.d because the laurel was once a girl whom he pursued with his love, and who, to escape his embraces, became a tree. The hyacinth and cypress were beautiful youths, dear to Apollo, and accidentally slain by him in sport. After their death they became flowers. Such myths of metamorphoses, as has been shown, are an universal growth of savage fancy, and spring from the want of a sense of difference between men and things.*

The legend of Apollo has only been slightly sketched, but it is obvious that many elements from many quarters enter into the sum of his myths and rites.** If Apollo was originally the sun-G.o.d, it is certain that his influence on human life and society was as wide and beneficent as that of the sun itself. He presides over health and medicine, and over purity of body and soul. He is the G.o.d of song, and the hexameter, which first resounded in his temples, uttered its latest word in the melancholy music of the last oracle from Delphi:--