Miscellaneous Myths: Artemis and Apollo

In the field of mythology in general and greek mythology specifically, fraternal twins where one is a boy and the other is a girl are very unusual. Twins in general aren't. Castor and Pollux, Helen and Clytemnestra, Heracles and Iphicles, if you get late enough in the myth cycle you even get Romulus and Remus when Rome rolls into town.

But fraternal twins of different genders are quite rare, not just in Greek mythology but in mythology overall. You do get Freyr and Freyja over in norse mythology, but in general the identical twins far outnumber them. Even in the pantheons that share hypothetical proto-indo-european roots with Greek mythology, the only twins we really run into are identical - the Ashvins in Hinduism and their twin sons Nakula and Sahadeva, Lugal-Irra and Meslamta-Ea in Babylon, the Dioscuri in Greece.

The always-identical "Divine Twins" are even a reconstructed proto-indo-european god archetype - so take that with as many grains of salt as you want, but the bottom line is, mythology in that slice of the world is loaded with identical god-twins and very sparse in the fraternal god-twin department. In the mortal cases Greek mythology is fond of having twins where only one of them has a divine parent, but in the case of twin gods they're almost always all-the-way identical and function basically as two copies of the same guy. Which brings us to a perhaps rather obvious line of inquiry: where did Artemis and Apollo come from?

We've discussed in previous videos how the roots of different Greek gods can be traced through the historical record, with varying degrees of accuracy, certainty and success, to paint a possible picture of where these gods geographically and culturally originated, how they changed and moved over the centuries and what social pressures or changes may have affected their characterization over time. Aphrodite's glow-up is one of the most dramatic and obvious, as her central role in Rome's mythological origins helped keep her very solidly documented over the centuries, and her Phoenician origins are pretty well agreed on in the scholarship around her. But some gods are trickier to track, and right out the gate, Artemis and Apollo are giving us trouble, because when we go looking for likely candidates for where they might have come from, we find nothing.

There are no convenient brother-sister twin pairings in any of the surrounding areas, certainly none that match their divine domains of archery, medicine, hunting vs civilization, etcetera. But this lack of information does actually give us one very important clue right out the gate: Artemis and Apollo may have their origins in non-Greek cultures, but they don't seem to have started out as a matched set. Now this is not actually the weirdest thing in the world.

We have to remember that gods are not people, and their genealogy is not set in stone. Hermes seems to have started his life as an offshoot of the god Pan and was later written to be Pan's father, and Persephone's parentage oscillates between Poseidon and Zeus depending on where and when you're asking. So it is not too bizarre to consider the possibility that Artemis and Apollo did not start their divine existences as twins, but were two initially unrelated gods that became twins over time.

For one thing, if we go looking in the Linear B inscriptions from the pre-Greek-Dark-Age Mycenaean civilization, we can find Artemis in the ledgers of Pylos, but we can't find Apollo anywhere. This does not categorically mean that Apollo, or a god who would become Apollo, did not exist in Mycenaean Greece. It's possible he just had another name - for instance, we actually can find two names that later became epithets of Apollo, "Smintheus" and "Paieon", attested at Knossos.

But it does mean that Artemis and Apollo were not, at this point, two of a pair. Their names or epithets aren't listed in the same areas and it's not even clear if Apollo exists yet, while Artemis's worship was solid enough that it has an actual archaeological record to back it up, with artifacts from as far back as the Greek Dark Age found at a temple to Artemis Orthia in Sparta. Again a lack of information gives us information.

With Artemis attested in Linear B we can pretty solidly assume she was a Mycenaean god, and if she has foreign origins earlier than that, we don't really have any chance of figuring out what they are. But Apollo's absence is interesting, and suggests that he might have a more far-flung origin. This is potentially supported by the fact that the etymology of his name is uncertain, and there's no obvious Greek root for what it means, though "ἀπέλλα" (apella) has been suggested, which would mean "wall" or "fence" or "place where people gather", which could potentially match up with his role as a god of civilization in contrast with Artemis's stewardship of the wild, but it's disputed and possibly nonsense, so who knows.

So there is still a pretty hard limit to how much information we can get from no information. Now while Apollo's place of origin isn't known, it is interesting that he has an awful lot of myths about coming to greece from somewhere else, most of which are discussed in his Homeric Hymn. To start with, he and Artemis are born on the comparatively far-flung island of Delos because Hera used her goddess-powers to forbid their mother Leto from giving birth anywhere closer to home, giving a plausible mythological reason for why Apollo would've had to join the pantheon late and from somewhere else.

Reinforcing that theme, in Delphi, Apollo's major cult center, he was mostly revered for slaying and usurping the Python, described in the hymn as a monstrous dragon and the offspring of Typhon - so in broad strokes Apollo is born outside of Greece, comes to Delphi, seizes control of Python's place of power and takes his place as the local god. That looks like an analogy for a new god rolling up in the neighborhood and finding his niche in the pantheon, by force if necessary. The hymn also describes Apollo wandering the world for a while, looking for the perfect place to establish his center of worship and at one point abducting a crew of Cretan sailors to be his worshippers.

We'll get more into this later, but it paints a picture about how the Greeks may have thought of Apollo by the roughly-500s BCE, when the later hymns were being written - as a well-established and broadly well-respected deity who, nonetheless, came to Greece a little late in the game. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's stick to the timeline and see what we can find that way.

After the Greek Dark Ages the first big source we have on hand is, of course, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and lucky for us, Artemis and Apollo are major players in the Iliad - but, interestingly, they're both firmly on the antagonistic and non-Achaean Trojan's side. Now, admittedly, so is Zeus, so this doesn't mean that Trojan-favoring gods were automatically being framed as foreign scary bad-guy gods or anything - but they were on the same side as Aphrodite, who we know was a Phoenician import god still kinda gettin' her legs under her, and Ares, a god the Greeks seem to have generally disliked. And the way these two are characterized in the story is a little… odd, when you compare it to their later portrayals.

Not everything is weird! A lot of their very consistent character traits are established. While they aren't explicitly referred to as twins in so many words, they are full siblings, and Artemis is a great huntress and archer and the "patroness of wild beasts" with a habit of divinely smiting people for wrongdoings, disrespect and possibly shits and giggles, while Apollo is the lyre-playing leader of the muses who is also an expert archer who strikes down mortals on the regs, and he's already established as a major god in Troy, as Agamemnon disrespecting his priest is what kicks off his direct intervention in the war.

Achilles at one point describes him as "the most malicious of all gods", but he's explicitly pretty biased so we don't need to take that as 100% factual or representative of the popular attitudes at the time. Artemis and Apollo are both also described as healing various combatants, making them stronger and cooler-looking and other General God Things that are pretty much par for the course, but while this all sounds pretty much in line with what we expect, elements of their characterization seem a little bit… off from their more well-known versions. For one thing, despite Artemis being described as a powerful hunter goddess and the mistress of wild beasts, when the gods square up to fight each other, Hera literally beats the crap out of her with her own bow and sends her crying to Zeus.

This doesn't really line up with her "strong and wrathful goddess of the wilds" thing, though in fairness she might be suffering from The Worf Effect, since Hera is the most powerful goddess in the pantheon and this scene specifically is dedicated to proving that, and more broadly to proving why the gods don't fight each other directly. But while Artemis is literally spanked and sent crying home to daddy, Apollo is portrayed a little more… respectfully? He's still framed as a bit of a terrifying, dread god, but he's also smart enough to not pick a fight with Uncee Poseidon and subsequently get his ass beat, so he comes out of the whole situation looking less arrogant than his sister.

Which could've been intentional. We can't read too far into this, and this is just me conspiracy-boarding again, but if Artemis was already a well-established and powerful Greek god at this point, but Apollo was a slightly newer addition to the pantheon, one way to give him credibility would be to explicitly portray him as superior to his sister - wiser and on better terms with the other gods. This isn't the only time the Iliad makes an explicit statement about a newly-integrated god, as it also goes out of its way to declaw Aphrodite's apparently pre-existing war associations when Zeus firmly and blatantly tells her that she has no place on the battlefield.

And also it would be disingenuous to not acknowledge that the Ancient Greeks had some pretty strong opinions about gender roles that might possibly be being reinforced here. The gods are much less centralized in The Odyssey, so the only references we get to Artemis and Apollo are distant and reverent rather than personal godly exploits, and the main theme is that they seem to be credited with causing sudden, unexpected deaths with their divine arrows. Again, not their most friendly look.

One common interpretation of this is that Artemis and Apollo's arrows represent illness and corresponding sudden death, which would make this an early instance of their incidental association with medicine - when a god is in charge of killing you in a specific way, you might ask them to specifically not do that. Another important player referenced in the Iliad is Artemis and Apollo's mother Leto, who is - like her children - on the Trojan side of the conflict. During the Big God Fight where Artemis gets whacked, Hermes is squared off against Leto but respectfully refuses to fight her and asks her to tell everyone that she beat him fair and square.

Then she gathers up Artemis's dropped bow and scattered arrows and goes off to comfort her after her vicious ass-beating at the hands of Hera. And it is interesting that, while Artemis and Apollo are framed as pretty terrifying and antagonistic, Leto is afforded only the highest respect by both the gods and the narrative overall. We don't get much more about Leto here, but we get a little bit more in the Theogony by Hesiod, written around the same time as the Iliad and Odyssey, who says that Leto and Zeus were together before Zeus married Hera, and thus Artemis and Apollo are basically Zeus's kids from a previous relationship with no explicit drama involved.

It also, again, only says that Artemis and Apollo are the children of Zeus and Leto - it does not say whether or not they are twins. This no-drama family picture severely contrasts with the version we get a few centuries later in the Homeric Hymns, which give us a very different and more familiar rundown of the circumstances of Apollo and Artemis's birth. Of course, it's not immune to its own weirdnesses.

For one thing, the homeric hymn to Apollo describes Leto giving birth to Artemis on the island of Ortygia, the location of which is uncertain because it could be referring to a half-dozen places of the same name, including one all the way at the boot end of Italy, and then giving birth to Apollo on the island of Delos. Now I know they're gods and I know the rules are different, but I'm counting this as evidence for my "these guys were not always twins" theory, because giving birth to twins on different islands seems wildly impractical otherwise. And in fact the Homeric Hymn does not call them twins.

Now, perhaps they are still implied to be twins by the fact that they both seem to be the result of the same vaguely-defined one-night-stand with Zeus and it's biologically unlikely otherwise, but they're gods, man! The rules are weird! Anyway, the Hymn explains that Leto is having an absolute bear of a time trying to find a place to have her baby, in large part because of Hera, who is very angry at this whole situation, evidently since in this version of the timeline Zeus got Leto pregnant after marrying Hera.

And while the causality is not directly stated in the hymn, fear of Hera's wrath is implied to be a large part of why all the places Leto tries to settle down to have her baby kick her out again. The only exception is the island of Delos, which is pretty crappy by island standards and devoid of all the classic appeals of a hunk of rock in the middle of the ocean, and Leto swears on the river styx that her glorious golden son will skyrocket the property values with his biggest and baddest temple if Delos will let her have her baby already, and the island agrees! But Hera does not, and keeps Eilithyia, goddess of childbirth, on a short leash for nine days and nights until the other goddesses fire off a message to kick her out of bed and she zips down to help Leto out.

Apollo is finally born and everyone is really impressed with how cool and badass he is, and he declares that the lyre and the bow will be his symbols and he will speak the will of Zeus. In celebration, Delos blooms with golden flowers and, true to his word, no matter how many temples Apollo gets, his shrine at Delos is always the best. The hymn to Pythian Apollo goes into more detail about some of the shenanigans Apollo gets up to, like absolutely shredding on the Lyre while Artemis kills it on the dance floor, and the singer recounts a short list of some of Apollo's many lovers before settling on the story of how Apollo found the perfect place to sit his oracle.

After a very scenic mediterranean grand tour he settles on the area of Crissa, lays out the foundations for his temple and then casually scoots over to a nearby spring currently populated by a terrible dragon, Python, and kills it, gaining the epithet Pythian and naming the place Pytho in one fell swoop. Then, of course, Apollo decides his fancy temple needs people to work at it, spots a nearby trading ship from Crete and decides those are just the guys he needs. Obviously looking to win first place in the Simple Solution Olympics, he turns himself into a dolphin and launches himself onto the deck of the ship, furiously shaking and rattling the boat whenever they try and throw him off so they have no choice but to leave him flopped on the deck while he summons the winds to steer them way off course.

When they finally go to ground near Crissa, Apollo zips off the ship, gets the temple all shiny for the new visitors and strolls out in all his glory to give 'em the good news. To honor his heroic exploit of kidnapping a ship full of sailors while shaped like a dolphin, the area is given the name Delphi. The homeric hymns to Artemis are a lot shorter and a lot less morally wack somehow.

They mostly praise her prodigious hunting skill, her virginity, and how she loves nothing more than racing through the mountains firing arrows in every direction, except when she wants to unwind, when she scoots back to Delphi to party with her brother and the Muses to sing about how they're the greatest gods in the entire pantheon. Hubris: it's okay when gods do it! Now it's worth noting that, at this point, Artemis and Apollo… really haven't changed all that much.

They've been remarkably consistent since the Iliad - Apollo as an extremely well-respected god of archery, prophecy and music with hints of healing thrown in the mix, Artemis as a more wild goddess of archery and the hunt. They are explicitly full siblings even in the stories that don't specify in so many words that they're twins, and they are overall very well-liked gods whose many feats are a credit to their divine mother Leto, even if those feats do involve killing an awful lot of mortals for often very flimsy reasons. Hesiod's Astronomia, another early source from the 700s-ish BCE around the same time as the theogony and the Homeric epics, lists a number of constellation myths that Artemis is involved in, giving us another look at her early post-Dark-Age characterization.

Artemis appears in the myth of Callisto, hunting wild beasts in the mountains before transforming Callisto into a beast herself. Orion is described as a hunting-companion to Artemis and her mother Leto, before being killed by a monstrous scorpion sent by Gaia and turned into a constellation at Artemis and Leto's behest. Later, in the 300-200s, Aratus's Phaenomena does the same, describing a different version of the Orion myth where Artemis kills him herself for trying to assault her - the narrator actually apologizes to Artemis before telling the tale.

Apollo's less common in the constellation myths, but significantly more common in myths about his lovers and the resulting kids. Pindar wrote the Pythian Odes in the 400s BCE, which reaffirm Apollo's status as leader of the muses but also starts getting into his tumultuous love life. For instance, Pindar describes the birth of Asclepius, son of Apollo and hero-turned-god of medicine.

The gist is Asclepius's mother Coronis sleeps with someone else while pregnant with Apollo's kid, and Apollo gets big mad about it and sends Artemis to do some vengeance, but crucially doesn't tell her when to stop, so Artemis's divine smite leaves a lot of collateral damage - which supports the idea that Artemis and Apollo's arrows sometimes take the form of a plague. Apollo saves the unborn Asclepius from his mother's funeral pyre and gives him to Chiron to raise. Asclepius later uses his medical skills to bring someone back from the dead for money and Zeus strikes him with lightning about it.

This is probably one of the earlier instances of Apollo being associated with medicine - indirectly through his son - but other than that this story mostly reaffirms what's already been established. Apollo has powerful, oracular omniscience, a strong musical bent and a propensity for sharing the stage with the Muses, while his sister Artemis - is terrifying. However, there is one little crucial shift that we find around this time: along with the hot goss of the Pythain Odes, Pindar is also the first writer I can find who explicitly states that Artemis and Apollo aren't just siblings, they're twins.

He says as much in a fragmentary papyrus (Pa. XII) describing the story of their birth from yet another angle where they're both born at the same time, which makes sense. So it took us a few hundred years, but we finally got written confirmation.

By the 400s BCE, Artemis and Apollo were officially twins. Things start to shift more seriously when Rome becomes more of a thing closer to the tail end of the BCEs. The romans made my life personally a lot more difficult by enthusiastically syncretizing their own gods with the Greeks, and Artemis is no exception.

The Romans seem to have just taken Apollo wholesale, with temples to him popping up in Etruscan Italy as early as the 500s BCE and a cult of his manifesting in Pompeii around the same time, hitting Rome proper in 431 BCE with a temple dedicated to his healing aspect - and the fact that Apollo evidently didn't already have a similar Roman equivalent knocking around is pretty solid evidence for the idea that he's a quite late addition to the region, which is most likely why he's the only major Greek god whose name remains unchanged. But when it came to Artemis they did have a deity they could conflate her with - their own hunting goddess, Diana. Around 200 BCE Roman poet Ennius listed the twelve major roman gods in his Annales poem, now preserved only in fragments, and two of them are Apollo and Diana.

A couple centuries later Virgil gave us a much better-preserved text in the Aeneid, and namedrops the twins' Roman editions on the regular. Virgil describes Diana as chaste, accompanied by similarly chaste followers, and majestically leading a dance of nymphs while armed with her trusty quiver. In short, Virgil's description of Diana lines up very well with the Homeric Hymn's description of Artemis - right up until it doesn't, when he casually drops the idea that Diana is a triple-goddess like Hecate, a deity very commonly represented with three distinct faces and aspects and divine power over three-way crossroads, where Hecate's three-faced statues - hekataia - were commonly found.

Virgil also references Diana alongside Night, Erebus, Chaos and other extremely witchy gods in the context of Dido doing some very spooky magic, and he calls her by the epithet "Trivia," which explicitly means "triple. " None of this triple symbolism was in the mythology of Artemis, so this seems to have been the strictly Roman addition - the epithet "trivia", the triple nature and the association with spooky cthonic gods. This is quite a shift, and a very cool one!

Diana doesn't have as much triplicate statuary are Hekate does, but Roman coins from the last years of the BCEs show a tripled Diana, a recreation of a cult image to Diana Nemorensis from a sacred grove turned temple dedicated to her in the region of Nemi, Italy, that had seen continuous use since the 500s BCE, meaning that Diana's triple status was centuries old by the time the Romans started conflating her with Artemis. The Aeneid meanwhile mostly refers to Apollo as "Phoebus," the epithet meaning "bright", while Diana is described as a dark counterpoint to him. They're referenced together more often than not, and Aeneas is at one point urged to do a sacrifice to each of them, reinforcing their characterization as a matched set.

But there's one part of their characterization you might have noticed we haven't found yet, and that's their astronomical side. After all, Apollo is famously a god of the sun and Artemis of the moon. But we've gone through more than eight hundred years of myths without even a hint of their most iconic symbolism.

So… when and where did that crop up? Well… really late. It doesn't come up at all in the pre-Roman myths, even in places where it'd make sense to bring up - like the various constellation myths Apollo and Artemis are wrapped up in, where their celestial counterparts would be very easy to loop into the narrative.

The first clear evidence we have of the connection is as late as 45 BCE, when Cicero's Nature of the Gods says outright that Diana is the goddess of the moon while Apollo is the god of the sun, and further links Diana's moon association with pregnancy and childbirth, something that's been in Artemis's purview since the early myths where in some versions she assisted in her own twin brother's delivery, which is a hell of a visual. It's a nice connection that lines up well with their divine domains, so it makes sense that it would catch on - but it also makes sense why it wouldn't have been a thing before the Romans started mashing gods together, because there were already Greek gods of the sun and moon - Helios and Selene, referenced as early as the Theogony alongside their sister Eos, goddess of the dawn. Helios turns up in the Odyssey and Selene and Helios are the subjects of their own homeric hymns, meaning they were clearly distinct deities for a while.

The sun and moon are probably some of the easiest natural phenomena to assign gods to, so it's not too much of a stretch to assume that Helios and Selene are some of the oldest gods in the pantheon, or even the pre-greek theoretical Proto-Indo-European pantheon scholars like fistfighting each other about. But when Rome rolled up, with their habit of syncretizing gods left and right, the similar-and-yet-very-different fraternal twins, Apollo with his bright associations and Diana with her dark, wild ones, must've made very tempting targets for just a little more divine conflation to give them command over nature's own similar-and-yet-very-different celestial phenomena. By the time of Cicero, Apollo is solidly the god of the sun and Artemis - slash Diana - is the goddess of the moon.

Of course once the Romans roll up we start looking for ol' reliable Ovid right around the start of the CEs, and Ovid has goss aplenty about the twins. This is where we find the story of Niobe, who brags about having more children than Leto and therefore being a better mom, at which point Leto's two children slaughter Niobe's children and she turns into a rock about it. Ovid also recounts a few of Apollo's ill-fated romantic exploits, including Daphne - who turns into a tree to escape him - and Hyacinthus, who's into the relationship and then dies anyway.

Meanwhile, Artemis, or "Diana", is less of a major player and is instead portrayed as a bit of a distant force of nature - for instance, she sends a massive boar to ravage Calydon when its king fails to honor her with the other gods, and this appears to be her default method of conflict resolution, because according to some footnotes there are versions where Diana also sends a boar to kill Adonis because Ares, or Mars, was jealous of how much attention Aphrodite, or Venus, was giving him, which is honestly a very bro move of her. Ovid's version of the myth of Callisto features Zeus/Jupiter taking Diana's form and seducing Callisto that way, at which point Diana exiles Callisto for violating their virgins-only policy. Diana is also referenced at several points in the tale of the unfortunate nymph Arethusa, who is pursued by the extremely horny river Alpheus.

Diana does several acts of divine intervention to facilitate her escape and ultimately turns her into a freshwater spring to get her outta there for good. Ovid tends to mark the point in the timeline where the gods have reached their final consistent characterization. And all things considered, Artemis and Apollo have an interesting developmental curve.

Artemis is thoroughly ancient, pre-classical-antiquity minimum, and seems to have been worshipped in the wild, dark places and feared when she gets mad and encroaches in the civilized ones, but Apollo seems to have come out the gate swinging as an instant beacon of power and civilization, creativity and the arts, appearing in the Homeric era with a cavalcade of myths about coming from a far-flung, exiled birth. Apollo continues to serve as a god of music and the arts, leader of the Muses and a dealer in creativity and inspiration, but he also stays firmly planted in the city centers, with oracles and priests and power and a long list of superpowered lovers and heroic offspring, while Artemis's power over the wilderness and its wild creatures and the people who choose to leave the structure of civilization to forsake love and partnership and join her in the hunt - is only exacerbated when she gains Diana's cthonic triple-goddess crossroads symbolism and later power over the moon. Apollo is a god of civilization, Artemis of the uncivilized wild.

Together they cover basically everything the average Ancient Greek is liable to deal with on a daily basis. It's almost unsurprising that they slowly absorbed more and more symbolism. If Apollo is the god of light and civilization, why wouldn't you also tie him in with the daylight, the time where civilization gets most of its civilizing done?

And if Artemis is a goddess of navigating the wild and dangerous wilderness, why wouldn't you give her power over the moonlight that casts the world in shifting, uncertain shadows, that commands the nighttime when the animals she hunts are most active? Artemis and Apollo fit together. Narratively and aesthetically speaking, they're just plain fun.

And they're also dangerous, fickle and unpredictable. Their divine domains contain multitudes and those multitudes contradict. Artemis is a defender of young women and also the goddess whose job it is to kill them.

She helps hunters and gives people who don't wanna marry a career option and divine protection, and she also unleashes wild animals on innocent towns whenever she's provoked and kills any hunter that gets too hubristic about their own skill. Apollo is a god of music and creativity who leads the Muses, mistresses of inspiration, and one way to interpret his many mortal lovers is a metaphor for creative inspiration, striking at random and often to devastating effect. And another way to read it is that Apollo's disastrous lovelife is a nightmare because he does not take "no" for an answer, making his relationship with Artemis, the protector of young women who intercedes when they're attacked, a very blatant conflict.

And that can make my flavor of storytelling… difficult. I mean, how are we supposed to like these guys? How can we be cutesy and fun about these people that've done so much fucked up stuff?

Well. There's a problem in our premise. At the end of the day, when we analyze any god, we have to remember that they are not people.

These contradictory characteristics - blessings and atrocities doled out in equal measure, protections and injustices inflicted on hapless mortals - these are not moral actions taken by human beings. Artemis and Apollo are gods that existed through a civilization for nearly a millennium, and in that time they were the subject of many stories. Why are the greek gods so fickle?

Why don't they always help the people they care about? Why does the mistress of the hunt both protect and kill her hunters? Well, because sometimes hunters live and sometimes they die.

Sometimes arrows rain down from heaven and the people they strike get sick, and sometimes they just as randomly get better. And if you worship gods that represents those realities, those gods are not going to be entirely benevolent. If you tell a story to explain the world, especially if you tell that story over a thousand years, the story is not going to be entirely happy, and I think that's what makes the story so interesting.

When we unravel one of these gods, we're getting a glimpse of centuries of civilizations and generations of people making sense of the world around them. That civilization is long gone, the people are long dead, but the stories they told about the world and each other are still here. And two of those stories happen to be named "Artemis" and "Apollo.