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Cast portrait: Apollo
Reading Troy · cast portrait · released after Iliad I — Plague and Wrath
Reading Troy — cast portrait · Apollo
This portrait is released the day Apollo's arc peaks in the cycle, after Iliad I — Plague and Wrath. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.
Son of Zeus and Leto, twin brother of Artemis. Born on Delos. God of plague and healing, of the bow and the lyre, of prophecy and form. Standing Homeric epithets hekēbolos — "far-shooter" — and Phoibos — "the bright one." In the matter of Troy he is the most uncompromising of the city's divine partisans: of the four major pro-Trojan immortals (Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis), only Apollo combines power, reach, and clear narrative will. He kills more named characters across the cycle than any other god.
In the Iliad
The poem opens with him. In Book 1, in retaliation for Agamemnon's refusal to give back Chryseis to her priest, Apollo comes down from Olympus "like the night" with his bow across his back, and the silver arrows fall on mules and dogs and men for nine days. The plague is the Iliad's first divine act. His subsequent interventions are decisive: in Book 16 he stands on the Trojan wall and three times strikes the shield of Patroclus until Patroclus falls back; he then strips the armour off Patroclus's body and clears the way for Euphorbus and Hector to finish him. In Book 22, when Achilles is closing on Hector around the walls of Troy, it is Apollo who, in the moment Zeus's scales come down for Hector, abandons him — the god's withdrawal is the death itself. He spends much of the poem rescuing Trojans — Aeneas in Book 5 (he carries the wounded man off in a cloud and heals him in his temple); Hector at multiple points. In Book 24 he is the god who, with Zeus, finally insists that Achilles return Hector's body. He is the cycle's most consistent divine partisan of Troy and the cycle's most consistent killer of its first-rank heroes.
In the Posthomerica
Quintus takes Apollo's Iliadic outline and finishes the work. In Book 3 it is Apollo and Paris together who bring Achilles down at the Scaean Gate — Paris draws the bow, but Apollo guides the arrow to the one vulnerable place. The post-Homeric tradition of Achilles's heel sits on this scene; Quintus, working in late antiquity, can register the iconography but stays close to the Iliadic decorum of an arrow to the ankle. In Book 6 it is Apollo who, in response to Greek arrogance about the city's coming fall, takes a hand in defending it for a moment longer; in Book 13, when the city is taken, he reluctantly withdraws his protection. His function across Quintus is the god who keeps the count of Greek hubris and is paid in time at the end.
In the Aeneid
Virgil's Apollo is largely benign to the Trojans-in-exile — the god who had defended their city now guides the survivors. In Book 3, Aeneas at Delos receives an oracle from him — antiquam exquirite matrem, "seek out your ancient mother" — that misdirects him to Crete; the misreading is the cycle's gentle joke about prophecy. Throughout the Italian books Apollo is invoked as the patron of Augustus (the Aeneid was written in the shadow of Augustus's vow of a great Palatine temple to him after Actium) and is the source of the Sibyl's voice in Book 6 and of the Battle of Actium scene on Aeneas's shield in Book 8 — Dryden renders the scene with Apollo's bow lit at the centre of the imperial future. The Iliadic killer of Achilles has become the Augustan god of empire's founding. The shift is the Aeneid's in miniature.
In the Odyssey
He plays only a small role. He is named as the god by whom Penelope swears, the god whose festival day (Apollo of the bow-shooting) provides the suitors' final occasion, and the god Odysseus prays to before stringing the bow in Book 22. The bow-contest at the end of the Odyssey is, structurally, an Apolline rite — the killing of the suitors falls on the day of Apollo. Homer makes the connection lightly and lets it stand.
Across the cycle
He is the cycle's most coherent god — the one figure whose attributes, partisanship, and methods scarcely change from poem to poem. He shoots; he heals; he prophesies; he protects Troy in the Iliad and the Posthomerica, the Trojan exiles in the Aeneid, and presides distantly over the bow-rite that closes the Odyssey. He is the divine continuity of the war. The interesting cross-cycle question is how a god so plainly Trojan in the first two epics becomes the Augustan-imperial god of the third — and the answer is the Aeneid's whole conceit: the Trojans, having lost Troy, win their war by becoming Rome, and Apollo travels with them across the change of name. The Homeric Apollo and the Virgilian Apollo are the same god in two civilisations; the cycle uses him to track the survival of one cult through a city's death.
This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.