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New Insights on an Old God: Apollo

Fritz Graf, Professor and Chair of Greek and Latin and Director of Epigraphy at the Center for Epigraphic and Palaeographic Studies at Ohio State, is one of the world's leading experts on ancient Mediterranean myths and religions. His most recent book, Apollo, will be published by Routledge on October 16, 2008. When asked what he had set out to do in this book, Graf responded as follows:

Apollo, the favorite son of Zeus, whose plans Apollo communicated to humans via oracles, is a divinity who even more than other Greek gods has intrigued and fascinated people long after the end of Greek religion. His eternal youth, his adolescent male beauty, his intimate connection with knowledge, light and music have made him attractive throughout the centuries (interestingly, however, it has gone almost unnoticed that in spite his adolescent brilliance, the Greeks did not think highly of him as a lover; his affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual, always seem to end in disaster).

My new book explores Apollo's many roles in Greek and Roman religion and culture, but also some of the ways he remained present in Western cultures up to the present day. In an often cited observation by the Greek historian Herodotus, Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks their gods: therefore, my treatment starts out with a portrait of Apollo in the Iliad, the Odyssey and the intricate Homeric Hymn to Apollo. The next four chapters each highlight one of Apollo's key roles in Greek society and religion: (1) Apolline mediumistic divination was practiced at the impressive and long lived oracular shrines of Delphi, Didyma and Clarus, but also by individuals such as the Sibyl. (2) In healing, a major Apolline prerogative in the Archaic Age, the god was slowly ousted by his son Asclepius, at least in Greece; Apollo Medicus, "the Doctor", flourished much longer in Rome and its provinces. (3) Poetry, music and dance (or rather mousiké, as the Greeks called the combined performance of song, instrumental music and dance), was central to archaic and classical Greek culture before this combination developed into the single art forms we know today. (4) Finally, Apollo as the protector of the city and especially its young adolescents, who served as warriors before becoming full citizens, was very important; the chapter led me to consider some rather unusual forms of political leadership among the Greeks.

In the reality of ancient life, these four key areas were much less tidily separated than in my description: Apolline and Asclepian medicine involved divination as much as singing and dancing; citizen warriors trained themselves in armed dancing, and in some Greek cities the powerful elite bore the title 'singer-dancers,' (molpoi) making dancing into the key ability of the chairman. I resisted the temptation to construct a hypothetical unity out of which these roles could have developed: origins have lost their fascination for me; what counts with a god is the complex tissue that his worship has created in cult and mythology. For the same reason, I dedicate only a very short chapter to Apollo's prehistory, despite the long debates in past scholarship: to me, it is almost impossible to tell whether Apollo was an Indo-European god or an import from Anatolia or the ancient Near East or a combination of these things; and it is not that important anyway when compared with the rich web of transformations we can trace during the historical periods.

I devote a long final chapter to Apollo's transformations after the demise of pagan gods; here, I covered a lot of territory that was very new to me, and that invites much more research than I could do in the context of the present book. Apollo survived as the sun in the mythology and astrology of the Middle Ages and beyond; he was invoked as a patron deity by poets from Dante, Petrarch and Pierre Ronsard to Rainer Maria Rilke, but and not unsurprisingly rejected by W. H. Auden; his myths inspired painters and composers; and his image in ancient sculpture provoked the enthusiasm of modern admirers, from Winckelmann's absolute praise of the Apollo Belvedere to the high appreciation of his archaic images in the twentieth century. Maybe what surprised me the most as I worked through the history of how this Greek god was received was the realization of how much, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literary, mythological accounts of Apollo were slowly superseded by the statues and images brought to light by archaeology-how the images ousted the text.