seated by the omphalos in conversation with an enthroned Zeus, Apollo being absent altogether. It was Zeus who had established Apollo as his inspired mouthpiece,[1] and the Pythian priestess invoked Zeus immediately before taking her seat on the prophetic tripod.[2] The prominence thus accorded to Zeus at Delphi is readily intelligible if Apollo himself was the solar (and therefore chthonian and mantic) form of the sky-god.
But on this showing one would expect to find Apollo, like Zeus, connected with the oak, not with the laurel, at any rate in the remote past. And that is actually the case. The oldest of the Apolline myths is the story of the god's fight with Python at Delphi. Ovid,[3] after telling it, adds that to keep in memory this signal victory the Pythian games were instituted, and that "whosoever had won with hand or feet or wheel received the honour of oaken foliage (æsculeæ . . . frondis): the laurel as yet was not, and Phœbus crowned his brows, fair with their flowing tresses, from the nearest tree." It appears, then, that the laurel had been preceded by the oak at Delphi. Now the earliest worshippers of the Delphic Apollo were "Cretans from Minoan Cnossus";[4] and in Minoan Cnossus the oak was regarded as the tree of Zeus.[5] I infer that the Delphic Apollo had inherited the oak of the Cretan[6] Zeus. Agreeably to this we read that, when the Cretans dedicated at Delphi an image of Apollo, it was simply a natural bough.[7]
- ↑ Aesch. Eum., 17 ff.
- ↑ Ib., 28 f.
- ↑ Ov. met., 1. 445 ff.
- ↑ Hymn. Hom. Ap. Pyth., 218.
- ↑ Class. Rev., xvii., 405 ff.
- ↑ Note also the legend that the second temple of Delphi was built by one Pteras, after whom Apteræi in Crete was named (Paus., 10. 5. 10).
- ↑ Pind. Pyth., 5. 42, calls it (
Greek characters), i.e. the statue "which had been torn away with a single wrench (cp. Hesych. (Greek characters)) having grown" into shape on the tree. Herwerden (Lex. suppl. s.v. (Greek characters)) would read (Greek characters), "a figure carved from one block
