Apollo
APOLLO, the son of Zeus and Leto and the twin brother of Artemis, is the Greek god whom the European tradition already associated with the aesthetic splendor and brilliance of Greece before Johann Jakob Winckelmann (1717–1768), the founder of Greek art history, regarded the Belvedere Apollo (a Roman copy of a fourth-century Greek original that shows Apollo as a youthful archer) as the most perfect embodiment of Greek aesthetics and Greek gods. Apollo's image as a beautiful and permanently young man significantly contributed to this modern evaluation, as did Apollo's identification with the sun. His darker sides, expressed through his deathly mastery of archery, were eclipsed in this modern reception. In Greek myth, Apollo is the favorite son of Zeus but has relatively few independent stories; he is connected either with young men and women, or with specific sanctuaries such as Delos or Delphi. In Greek religion, Apollo was the protector of young males and presided over divination, healing, and the complex of music and dance (Greek, molpē), whereas Etruscan and Roman religion embraced him almost exclusively as a healer.
The Etymology of Apollo
Almost uniquely among the twelve Olympian gods, Apollo's name does not appear in the Mycenaean Bronze Age texts; these texts only preserve a god called Paiawon, presumably an early form of Apollo's later epithet "Paian." In Homer and Hesiod, however (that is, in the late eighth or early seventh centuries BCE), Apollo's mythical and religious roles are firmly established, presumably developing and spreading during the intervening Dark Ages of the eleventh through the ninth centuries BCE.
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