This was another period of acute crisis for Rome - not because of a plague this time, but because of a foreign invader: Rome was engaged in a desperate struggle against the Carthaginian army of Hannibal, but things were not going well for them.
In fact, the Romans later regarded this war, the Second Punic War BCE as the longest and most dangerous of the many wars they had to fight. As often happened during the long agony of this struggle, oracles were consulted to help Rome hobble along after yet another set-back. Both the Sibylline books and the oracles of an ancient seer, Marcius, recommended that the Romans turn to Apollo and institute games in his honor.
But when yet another epidemic hit Rome in BCE, the senate decided to perpetuate the games and gave them a firm date, July This remained until the end of pagan Rome, and the games were always very popular. Later Romans debated the reasons for the games of Apollo. Clearly the god did not like his games to be disturbed by hostile foreigners.
The story must be an invention, and it could have been modeled on the story of how Apollo defended his Delphic sanctuary against the marauding Gauls in BCE. But whatever its origins, it turned Apollo the Healer into Apollo the formidable Archer. In the course of the late second and first centuries BCE, the Romans expanded northwest, into what is now France.
At first, they conquered the south and made it into their province, Gallia Transalpina; we still call it Provence, after the Roman word. In doing so, he broke both Roman law and international customs with an undeclared preemptive war against the Celtic tribes of Gaul and a massacre that raised protest in the Roman senate.
But Gaul became Roman for good, and with it the cults of Gaul. Or rather, any male divinity in Gaul who would heal or avert disease would be called Apollo, whatever name the natives had given him. Different divine names were just a matter of language; they could be translated from one language into another, as any other word. Roman conquerors, administrators, merchants, and settlers in Gaul and elsewhere would use the Latin name, and over time, the natives would follow suit.
Because of this linguistic habit, ancient sources are able to name several temples of Apollo in Gaul. The first sanctuary we hear of is in a Greek account ca. Roman inscriptions confirm the ubiquity of Apollo all over Gaul, often in connection with one of the many thermal springs there France, after all, is still the country of mineral water.
Archaeological research showed how many Gallic sanctuaries of Apollo fused native traditions with new influences: they usually had the square shape typical of indigenous temples. By then, the cult had long disappeared: most of the healing sanctuaries of Apollo in Gaul were destroyed during the Christianization of the fourth century CE, though a few were taken over by a local saint.
Perhaps the debate of the Roman theologians on why the games were founded was misguided, and there was no fundamental opposition between Apollo the Healer and Apollo the helper in battle. A series of oracles from Clarus point to the same direction. During a period after the middle of the second century CE, five different cities in Western Asia Minor were suffering from an epidemic, and they sent an embassy to Clarus for help.
In some cases, the disease must have been. Figure 7 The slaying of the Niobids. Attic red-figure krater by the Niobid Painter, ca. But since no oracle is clearly dated, more local outbreaks of disease cannot be excluded. Such rituals were practiced in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and one cannot but admire the deep ritual learning of the Clarian god, or of his priests. In all other answers, the god diagnosed the wrath of the gods as reason for the disease and prescribed complex rituals of purification and sacrifices to placate them.
His weapon also keeps it away. Disease, that is, is just another enemy, a sort of evil demon secretly trying to sneak in through an unguarded city gate; the guardian archer is as able to fend it off as he is able to drive away an attacking horde of foreign foes.
Today, we differentiate between enemies and germs, or between war and disease, which Greeks and Romans would not necessarily have done: Apollo, the excellent sharp-shooter, kept both away.
When the plague is driven out, health is restored. Health, then, could be nothing else than the absence of disease. This has a philosophical ring to it: one can define the good simply as the absence of evil, as did the Epicureans.
Others, demanding more of life, prefer to have real good follow the driving out of evil; to a Platonist, the idea of the good is the highest reality he can think of. The philosophical debate is far from idle; it mirrors attitudes to life that are reflected in religion as often as they are in philosophy.
Apollo, to stay with our god, can preside over both ways of looking at things, as the ritual cycle of the Thargelia teaches. The Thargelia is a festival common to all Ionians, and it gave its name to the month Thargelion, the second last month of the Ionian year; in the climate of the Aegean, the year did not end with the mild winter but with the summer heat that parched all vegetation.
Festival and month thus go back at least before the moment sometime at the end of the Bronze Age or the very beginning of the Iron Age when the mainland Ionians settled across the Aegean on the west coast of Asia Minor and took with them the calendar of their lands of origin. The pharmakoi - two in Athens, one for each gender - were captives who were fed by the state. On sixth Thargelion, they were adorned with a necklace of figs, led through the city in a procession with the music of a flute, often beaten up and finally driven out of the town.
Stories that tell how they were killed are extrapolations from the ritual that spell out its hidden meaning: the scapegoats were the embodiment of all that was evil in the town and so had to be destroyed. After this ritual purification of the sixth day, the seventh was the day of renewal and plenty.
In Athens at least, new fire was brought in from the sacred hearth at Delphi and used to rekindle the public hearth in the council-house from which then the private households got their own new fire, as did the temples. In a ritual movement reminiscent of the Spartan Hyacinthia with its contrast of grief on the first day and exuberance on the second, the cycle of the Thargelia represents the renewal after the cleansing of the city from evil. Unlike the cases we talked about earlier, where happiness returned simply after the city was purged from disease, the ritual of the Thargelia did not simply purify the town but added new and tangible goods, from cakes and honey to new fire.
In later Greece, Apollo the Healer was much less prominent than Apollo the patron of divination, or of music. From the fifth century BCE onwards, another healer, Asclepius, enhanced his own standing all over the ancient world. The Iliad mentions Asclepius as a healer taught by the centaur Chiron: the wise centaur bridged the gap between nature and culture and possessed, among other things, a deep knowledge of healing herbs.
Angry at the deception and infidelity, Apollo shot his human rival and sent his sister Artemis to kill Coronis. Some later writers add that Apollo also punished the unlucky messenger bird; before this affair, it had been white. So it was from Chiron, and not from his father, that Asclepius learnt the art of healing. The cult of Apollo is closely connected with that of his son: before entering the innermost sanctuary of Asclepius in Tricca, one had to sacrifice to Apollo.
This leads us to an entirely different region, the Southwestern Peloponnese, and connects the myth with another important sanctuary of Asclepius. For many centuries, Messene was subject to Spartan rule; after it regained political independence, the Messenians built a splendid temple to Asclepius.
It stood on a square in the center of their town, with smaller sanctuaries under the arcades that surrounded the square.
The myth precedes the sanctuary by more than two centuries, and there must have been an older cult in Messene about whose location we know nothing. The two myths clearly disagree with each other; there is no way to combine the Thessalian and the Messenian origin of Asclepius.
Given the early dates of both versions, we have no certain means of knowing where Asclepius came from. Technically, Asclepius is a hero, the son of a god and a mortal woman.
But some sons born from such a union became much more powerful than most other heroes and could be regarded as gods: Dionysus, the son of Zeus and the mortal princess Semele, was an Olympian god; Heracles, son of Zeus and the Theban queen Alcmene, was elevated into Olympus after his death. A similar fate awaited the hero Asclepius: thanks to his healing powers, he quickly came to be regarded as a divinity. When grown up, Asclepius became the best physician that ever existed.
Carried away by his success, however, he forgot the limits that Zeus had set to mortal men: he tried to resuscitate the dead. Zeus killed him with his lightning, restoring the cosmic order which Asclepius threatened out of arrogance or out of greed; some at least say that he was seduced by money.
No mortal can become immortal, if not by the decree of Zeus; to Greek story-tellers, the art of the physicians had the potential to break down these firm limitations of human existence. In the early sixth century BCE, it arrived in the lonely forests near the small Peloponnesian town of Epidaurus.
Here, Apollo had a long-standing cult on a hill-top overlooking a beautiful valley. In the later Bronze Age, there had been a peak sanctuary on this hill; it is unclear whom the Mycenaeans worshipped there. The cult died out before the end of the Bronze Age, but the memory of the sanctuary must have lingered on.
After an interruption of several centuries, the locals built an altar and then a small temple to a new god whom they addressed as Apollo Maleatas.
Local theologians rewrote the myth of Coronis; this is the third version of the Asclepius story. When secretly pregnant with Asclepius, she accompanied her father, who had business in the Peloponnesus.
In Epidaurus, she furtively gave birth to a boy and exposed him in a lonely forest glen nearby. As happens always in such tales of exposure, the baby was miraculously saved - not by his divine father, however, but by helpful animals.
A goat suckled him, the watch-dog of the herd guarded him, and finally the goat-herd followed his animals, found the boy and brought him up as his own. The higher the level of tone, the greater this dynamic tension is, and the greater the capacity of the organism to respond with decisiveness, strength, and vigor. When we exercise, we're toning up our muscles; we also feel more vital and alive, responsive and energetic.
Stringing Apollo's bow means bringing these powerful opposing forces into the proper relationship or alignment. Until this happens, the system is non-functional, or dysfunctional, and unable to respond properly.
Apollo's lyre symbolizes the gift of music, which is the harmony of sounds. To have health and healing, there must be a harmonious ordering of all the vital forces within the organism; all the strings must be in tune. Since I was ten, I have been fascinated by mythology — in particular Greek mythology, with its array of gods, monsters and heroes.
Though each god is remarkable in their own way, I found Apollo to be particularly interesting. Apollo appears to be, what we might call today, bisexual. He was the god of so many things that even the Ancient Greeks got confused. Oil painting of the god Apollo by Simone Cantarini. Apollo in his chariot surrounded by female figures from the ceiling fresco Aurora by Guido Reni Apollo wasted no time in avenging his mother, Leto. Apollo liked cows…but he liked music more.
Apollo was temporarily stripped of his immortal power by Zeus — twice. Capturing native animal folk tales of the British Isles. Sign up for our newsletter Enter your email address below to get the latest news and exclusive content from The History Press delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up.
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