god of the Doric race, but also (under the surname of Patrôus) the great protecting divinity of the gentile tie among the lonians:[1] he is moreover the guide and stimulus to Grecian colonization, scarcely any colony being ever sent out without encouragement and direction from the oracle at Delphi: Apollo Archêgetês is one of his great surnames.[2] His temple lends sanctity to the meetings of the Amphiktyonic assembly, and he is always in filial subordination and harmony with his father Zeus: Delphi and Olympia are never found in conflict. In the Iliad, the warm and earnest patrons of the Greeks are Hêrê, Athênê, and Poseidôn: here too Zeus and Apollo are seen in harmony, for Zeus is decidedly well-inclined to the Trojans, and reluctantly sacrifices them to the importunity of the two great goddesses.[3] The worship of the Sminthian Apollo, in various parts of the Troad and the neighboring territory, dates before the earliest periods of Æolic colonization:[4] hence the zealous patronage of Troy ascribed to him in the Iliad. Altogether, however, the distribution and partialities of the gods in that poem are different from what they become in later times,—a difference which our means of information do not enable us satisfactorily to explain. Besides the Delphian temple, Apollo had numerous temples throughout Greece, and oracles at Abæ in Phôkis, on the Mount Ptôon, and at Tegyra in Boeotia, where he was said to have been born,[5] at Branchidæ near Miletus, at Klarus in Asia Minor, and at Patara in Lykia. He was not the only oracular god: Zeus at Dodona and at Olympia gave responses also: the gods or heroes Trophônius, Amphiaraus, Amphilochus, Mopsus, etc., each at his own
- ↑ Harpocration v. Ἀπόλλων πατρῶος and Ἑρκεῖος Ζεύς. Apollo Delphinios also belongs to the Ionic Greeks generally. Strabo, iv. 179.
- ↑ Thucydid. vi. 3; Kallimach. Hymn. Apoll. 56.—
Φοῖβος γὰρ ἀεὶ πολίεσσι φιληδεῖ
Κτιζομέναις, αὐτὸς δὲ δεμείλια Φοῖβος ὑφαίνει. - ↑ Iliad, iv. 30-46.
- ↑ Iliad, i. 38, 451; Stephan. Byz. Ἵλιον, Τένεδος. See also Klauscn. AEneas and die Penaten, b. i. p. 69. The worship of Apollo Sminthios and the festival of the Sminthia at Alexandria Troas lasted down to the time of Menander the rhetor, at the close of the third century after Christ.
- ↑ Plutarch. Defect. Oracul. c. 5. p. 412; c. 8, p. 414; Steph. Byz. v. Τεγύρα The temple of the Ptoan Apôllo had acquired celebrity before the days of the poet Asius. Pausan. ix. 23, 3.
