_Can we discover the original character of this divinity in the earliest days of the worship in Greece? A belief that still appears to prevail in ordinary classical scholarship is that he began his career as a sun-god, displacing earlier and less per- sonal solar powers, and became gradually human- ized and withdrawn from this elemental sphere. But the belief is uncritically held, and breaks down before the evidence of the cult-facts. The epithets whereby a Greek divinity was addressed in prayer
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and official hymns give the best clue to the ideas of ancient worship. None of those that are attached to Apollo can be naturally interpreted as desig- nating a god of the sun or of the lights of heaven. Avxewos, one of his most common titles, can come from the stem of \v«o-s, ‘ wolf,’ and not phonetically from the stem of Avx«y, an assumed old Greek word for ‘light.’ Aveyyerijs, an epithet only used twice in the Jliad in a conversation between Athena and the Lycian Pandaros, can mean, in accord with the laws of word -formation, either ‘Lycian-born’ or ‘wolf-born’: the latter significance being in har- mony with a well-attested legend. AiyAzjrns, ‘the god of the gleam’ at Anaphe, appears to have been a later transformation for an older form ’Acyeddras, a term of quite ditterent import.
At a comparatively later period, Apollo comes into touch with Helios, especially in Asia Minor: the same may be said of other divinities, for whom no one would claim a solar origin. The first to identify him with Helios was Euripides ; but this poet is often quite reckless of the popular religious view, and the statement belongs to a certain theory of his.
In pagan North Europe, and in pagan Greece, the leading practices of ritual that have been dis- covered and interpreted by modern research aimed at ensuring fertility and growth in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. This must be the chief in- terest of primitive society in the pastoral and agricultural age ; and it is this that gives function and much of their character to most of the Hellenic divinities throughout all periods of their career, and especially to Apollo.
Doubtless, the earliest Hellenic invaders had already advanced beyond the social level of the hunter and the shepherd. Yet early cult and cult- ideas that survived the changes and progress of the ages preserve the traits of savage life. Here and there Apollo was still the cave-dweller: for in- stance, near Magnesia on the Meander, where his image and spirit filled his priests with superhuman force, so that in wild frenzy they bounded down steep rocks and uprooted strong trees: even in cultured Athens he was still worshipped in a cave on the Acropolis. To this period belong such con- ceptions as that of Apollo Av«cewos, the wolf-god, the son of a wolf-mother, the god to whom wolves were offered in Argive ritual. In Cyprus we come upon the worship of Apollo “YAdrys, the deity of the woodland, to whom certain trees were sacred ; and the bow, the weapon of early man, and always the chief badge of Apollo, belongs to him as the divinity of the chase, to whom the huntsman even in the days of Arrian offered a tithe of the spoil. Through- out all Hellas he was worshipped also as the deity of flocks and herds, who tended sheep and horned cattle in the pastures, and brought plentiful supply of milk, as Nowos and Taddévos. The agricultural life, which is again a higher stage, is also under his care. He guards the crops from mildew and vermin, preserves the boundaries of the tenements, and to his shrines at Delphi and Delos the Greek States far and wide send their tribute of corn,
His festivals, which fell in spring, summer, and early autumn, but never in winter, attest very clearly his vegetative and agricultural character. At Amyele, in Laconia, he succeeded to and absorbed the cult of an old hero of vegetation, Hyacinthus, probably a pre - Hellenic personage, the beautiful youth who dies young and is bewailed as the incarnation of the bloom and the early fruits of the year. His grave was beneath the base- ment of Apollo’s statue, and the first part of the Hyacinthia festival was consecrated to him ; the note of sorrow in the ritual is an echo from the pHnsitte life of the husbandman and harvester in
urope and Asia. The Laconian festival of the
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Kdpveia is one of peculiar interest, and it is im- possible here to cope with the questions that arise concerning it. Our own view is that Apollo Kdpyetos, whose name means ‘the cattle-god,’ was worshipped by the Dorians in North Greece, and probably by the Dryopes before the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese; that the Dorians established his worship in Megara, Sicyon, Argos, and Sparta, though a previous migration, possibly of the Dryopes, may have already planted the worship in certain parts of Southern Greece. The Spartan ritual has been well interpreted by Mannhardt : for nine days all the people lived in tents or huts, a reminiscence of primitive life, and the chief act of the festival was the pursuit of a man called ‘the runner,’ who was covered with garlands, by youths who carried grape clusters ; if they caught
im, it was a good omen for the crops and vintage. The ritual is vegetation-magic and old European. Upon this, as upon the ritual of the Hyacinthia, the higher worship of the god of song and music was engrafted.