THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto and twin brother of Artemis, was born on the Aegean island of Delos. God of light, prophecy, music, healing, and archery, he appears as a beardless youth bearing a silver bow or the seven-stringed lyre; the laurel is his tree, the swan and the dolphin his animals. The Iliad opens with his anger: after his priest Chryses was insulted, his plague arrows fell on the Greek camp for nine days.
The Homeric Hymn to Apollo tells how he slew the great serpent Python below Mount Parnassus and claimed Delphi, founding the oracle there. His priestess the Pythia, seated on a tripod, delivered his answers; Greek cities consulted the shrine before founding colonies or declaring war, and called the spot the navel of the earth. In Ovid's Metamorphoses his pursuit of the nymph Daphne ends when her river-god father transforms her into a laurel tree, from whose branches Apollo makes his crown — the wreath that has honored poets and victors ever since.
