The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (17 page)

c
. On his return to Greece, Apollo sought out Pan, the disreputable old goat-legged Arcadian god and, having coaxed him to reveal the art of prophecy, seized the Delphic Oracle and retained its priestess, called the Pythoness, in his own service.

d
. Leto, on hearing the news, came with Artemis to Delphi, where she turned aside to perform some private rite in a sacred grove. The giant Tityus interrupted her devotions, and was trying to violate her, when Apollo and Artemis, hearing screams, ran up and killed him with a volley of arrows – a vengeance which Zeus, Tityus’s father, was pleased to consider a pious one. In Tartarus, Tityus was stretched out
for torment, his arms and legs securely pegged to the ground; the area covered was no less than nine acres, and two vultures ate his liver.
³

e
. Next, Apollo killed the satyr Marsyas, a follower of the goddess Cybele. This was how it came about. One day, Athene made a double-flute from stag’s bones, and played on it at a banquet of the gods. She could not understand, at first, why Hera and Aphrodite were laughing silently behind their hands, although her music seemed to delight the other deities; she therefore went away by herself into a Phrygian wood, took up the flute again beside a stream, and watched her image in the water, as she played. Realizing at once how ludicrous that bluish face and those swollen cheeks made her look, she threw down the flute, and laid a curse on anyone who picked it up.

f
. Marsyas was the innocent victim of this curse. He stumbled upon the flute, which he had no sooner put to his lips than it played of itself, inspired by the memory of Athene’s music; and he went about Phrygia in Cybele’s train, delighting the ignorant peasants. They cried out that Apollo himself could not have made better music, even on his lyre, and Marsyas was foolish enough not to contradict them. This, of course, provoked the anger of Apollo, who invited him to a contest, the winner of which should inflict whatever punishment he pleased on the loser. Marsyas consented, and Apollo impanelled the Muses as a jury. The contest proved an equal one, the Muses being charmed by both instruments, until Apollo cried out to Marsyas: ‘I challenge you to do with your instrument as much as I can do with mine. Turn it upside down, and both play and sing at the same time.’

g
. This, with a flute, was manifestly impossible, and Marsyas failed to meet the challenge. But Apollo reversed his lyre, and sang such delightful hymns in honour of the Olympian gods that the Muses could not do less than give the verdict in his favour. Then, for all his pretended sweetness, Apollo took a most cruel revenge on Marsyas: flaying him alive and nailing his skin to a pine (or, some say, to a plane-tree), near the source of the river which now bears his name.
⁴

h
. Afterwards, Apollo won a second musical contest, at which King Midas presided; this time he beat Pan. Becoming the acknowledged god of Music, he has ever since played on his seven-stringed lyre while the gods banquet. Another of his duties was once to guard the herds and flocks which the gods kept in Pieria; but he later delegated this task to Hermes.
⁵

i
. Though Apollo refuses to bind himself in marriage, he has got
many nymphs and mortal women with child; among them, Phthia, on whom he fathered Dorus and his brothers; and Thalia the Muse, on whom he fathered the Corybantes; and Coronis, on whom he fathered Asclepius; and Aria, on whom he fathered Miletus; and Cyrene, on whom he fathered Aristaeus.
⁶

j
. He also seduced the nymph Dryope, who was tending her father’s flocks on Mount Oeta in the company of her friends, the Hamadryads. Apollo disguised himself as a tortoise, with which they all played and, when Dryope put him into her bosom, he turned into a hissing serpent, scared away the Hamadryads, and enjoyed her. She bore him Amphissus, who founded the city of Oeta and built a temple to his father; there Dryope served as priestess until, one day, the Hamadryads stole her away, and left a poplar in her place.
⁷

k
. Apollo was not invariably successful in love. On one occasion he tried to steal Marpessa from Idas, but she remained true to her husband. On another, he pursued Daphne, the mountain nymph, a priestess of Mother Earth, daughter of the river Peneius in Thessaly; but when he overtook her, she cried out to Mother Earth who, in the nick of time, spirited her away to Crete, where she bcame known as Pasiphaë. Mother Earth left a laurel-tree in her place, and from its leaves Apollo made a wreath to console himself.
⁸

l
. His attempt on Daphne, it must be added, was no sudden impulse. He had long been in love with her, and had brought about the death of his rival, Leucippus, son of Oenomaus, who disguised himself as a girl and joined Daphne’s mountain revels. Apollo, knowing of this by divination, advised the mountain nymphs to bathe naked, and thus make sure that everyone in their company was a woman; Leucippus’s imposture was at once discovered, and the nymphs tore him to pieces.
⁹

m
. There was also the case of the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, a Spartan prince, with whom not only the poet Thamyris fell in love – the first man who ever wooed one of his own sex – but Apollo himself, the first god to do so. Apollo did not find Thamyris a serious rival; having overheard his boast that he could surpass the Muses in song, he maliciously reported it to them, and they at once robbed Thamyris of his sight, his voice, and his memory for harping. But the West Wind had also taken a fancy to Hyacinthus, and became insanely jealous of Apollo, who was one day teaching the boy how to hurl a discus, when the West Wind caught it in mid-air, dashed it against Hyacinthus’s
skull, and killed him. From his blood sprang the hyacinth flower, on which his initial letters are still to be traced.
¹⁰

n
. Apollo earned Zeus’s anger only once after the famous conspiracy to dethrone him. This was when his son Asclepius, the physician, had the temerity to resurrect a dead man, and thus rob Hades of a subject; Hades naturally lodged a complaint on Olympus, Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt, and Apollo in revenge killed the Cyclopes. Zeus was enraged at the loss of his armourers, and would have banished Apollo to Tartarus for ever, had not Leto pleaded for his forgiveness and undertaken that he would mend his ways. The sentence was reduced to one year’s hard labour, which Apollo was to serve in the sheep-folds of King Admetus of Therae. Obeying Leto’s advice, Apollo not only carried out the sentence humbly, but conferred great benefits on Admetus.
¹¹

o
. Having learned his lesson, he thereafter preached moderation in all things: the phrases ‘Know thyself!’ and ‘Nothing in excess!’ were always on his lips. He brought the Muses down from their home on Mount Helicon to Delphi, tamed their wild frenzy, and led them in formal and decorous dances.
¹²

1
. Hyginus:
Fabula
140; Apollodorus: i. 4. 1;
Homeric Hymn to Apollo
300–306; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 706.

2
. Aelian:
Varia Historia
iii. 1; Plutarch:
Greek Questions
12;
Why Oracles Are Silent
15; Pausanias: ii. 7. 7; x. 16. 3.

3
. Apollodorus: i. 4.1; Pausanias: ii. 30.3 and x. 6. 5; Plutarch:
Greek Questions
12; Hyginus:
Fabula
55; Homer:
Odyssey
xi. 576 ff.; Pindar:
Pythian Odes
iv. 90 ff.

4
. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 58–9; Hyginus:
Fabula
165; Apollodorus: i. 4. 2; Second Vatican Mythographer: 115; Pliny:
Natural History
xvi. 89.

5
. Hyginus:
Fabula
191; Homer:
Iliad
i. 603.

6
. Apollodorus: i. 7. 6; i. 3. 4; iii. 10. 3; iii. 1. 2; Pausanias: x. 17. 3.

7
. Antoninus Liberalis: 32; Stephanus of Byzantium
sub
Dryope; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
ix. 325 ff.

8
. Apollodorus: i. 7. 9; Plutarch:
Agis
9.

9
. Hyginus:
Fabula
203; Pausanias: viii. 20. 2; x. 5. 3; Parthenius:
Erotica
15; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
6.

10
. Homer:
Iliad
ii. 595–600; Lucian:
Dialogues of the Gods
14; Apollodorus: i. 3.3; Pausanias: iii. 1. 3.

11
. Apollodorus: iii. 10. 4; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 71.

12
. Homer:
Iliad
i. 603–4; Plutarch:
On the Pythian Oracles
17.

1
. Apollo’s history is a confusing one. The Greeks made him the son of Leto, a goddess known as Lat in Southern Palestine (see
14.
2
), but he was also a god of the Hyperboreans (‘beyond-the-North-Wind-men’), whom Hecataeus (Diodorus Siculus: ii. 47) clearly identified with the British, though Pindar (
Pythian Odes
x. 50–55) regarded them as Libyans. Delos was the centre of this Hyperborean cult which, it seems, extended south-eastward to Nabataea and Palestine, north-westward to Britain, and included Athens. Visits were constantly exchanged between the states united in this cult (Diodorus Siculus:
loc cit
.).

2
. Apollo, among the Hyperboreans, sacrificed hetacombs of asses (Pindar:
loc. cit
.), which identifies him with the ‘Child Horus’, whose defeat of his enemy Set the Egyptians annually celebrated by driving wild asses over a precipice (Plutarch:
On Isis and Osiris
30). Horus was avenging Set’s murder of his father Osiris – the sacred king, beloved of the Triple Moon-goddess Isis, or Lat, whom his tanist sacrificed at midsummer and midwinter, and of whom Horus was himself the reincarnation. The myth of Leto’s pursuit by Python corresponds with the myth of Isis’s pursuit by Set (during the seventy-two hottest days of the year). Moreover, Python is identified with Typhon, the Greek Set (see
36.
1
), in the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo
, and by the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius. The Hyperborean Apollo is, in fact, a Greek Horus.

3
. But the myth has been given a political turn: Python is said to have been sent against Leto by Hera, who had borne him parthenogenetically to spite Zeus (
Homeric Hymn to Apollo
305); and Apollo, after killing Python (and presumably also his mate Delphyne), seizes the oracular shrine of Mother Earth at Delphi – for Hera was Mother Earth, or Delphyne in her prophetic aspect. It seems that certain Northern Hellenes, allied with Thraco-Libyans, invaded Central Greece and the Peloponnese, where they were opposed by the pre-Hellenic worshippers of the Earth-goddess, but captured her chief oracular shrines. At Delphi, they destroyed the sacred oracular serpent – a similar serpent was kept in the Erechtheum at Athens (see
25.
2
) – and took over the oracle in the name of their god Apollo Smintheus. Smintheus (‘mousy’), like Esmun the Canaanite god of healing, had a curative mouse for his emblem. The invaders agreed to identify him with Apollo, the Hyperborean Horus, worshipped by their allies. To placate local opinion at Delphi, regular funeral games were instituted in honour of the dead hero Python, and his priestess was retained in office.