Apollo- Roman GodDeity"Phoebus Apollo"

Plague and Arrival

In 433 BCE, plague struck Rome. The Senate opened the Sibylline Books and found their instruction: build a temple to Apollo. The temple rose in the Campus Martius, outside the city's sacred boundary, because Apollo was still a foreign god. Romans called him Apollo Medicus. His arrows had brought the pestilence. His favor would end it.

The Sibyl and the Books

Before the Republic, a woman came to King Tarquinius with nine books of prophecy and named her price. Tarquinius refused. She burned three and offered the remaining six at the same price. He refused again. She burned three more and held out the last three. Tarquinius paid. Those three volumes became the Sibylline Books, consulted in every crisis Rome faced for the next five centuries.

The woman was the Cumaean Sibyl, Apollo's voice in Italy. Her cave at Cumae had a hundred openings, and when the god seized her, his prophecies roared through every one. In the Aeneid, Aeneas came to that cave seeking passage to the underworld. The Sibyl's face changed color, her hair flew loose, her chest heaved as the god took hold of her. She led Aeneas below with the golden bough in his hand.

Ovid tells what became of her. She had asked Apollo for as many years of life as grains of sand she could hold in her fist. She forgot to ask for youth. By the time Aeneas met her, she had lived seven hundred years. She would shrink, Ovid writes, until nothing remained but her voice.

Daphne

Cupid struck Apollo with a gold-tipped arrow and Daphne with one tipped in lead. Apollo burned. Daphne ran. He chased her through the forest, calling out that he was no shepherd, no rough herdsman, that he was the son of Jupiter, lord of Delphi and Delos. She did not slow down. When his breath was hot on her neck, she called to her father, the river god Peneus. Her skin turned to bark and her arms to branches. Apollo pressed his hand against the trunk and felt her heart still beating beneath the wood. He claimed the laurel as his tree, and from that day victors and poets wore its crown.

Hyacinthus

Apollo and Hyacinthus were throwing a discus on a flat field. Apollo threw hard. The discus struck the ground and bounced into the boy's face. Apollo held him as he bled, trying every healing art he knew. The wound would not close. Hyacinthus died in the god's arms, and from his blood a flower grew. Apollo marked its petals with the letters AI AI, his own cry of grief.

Actium and the Palatine

At the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Augustus faced the combined fleet of Antony and Cleopatra off the coast of western Greece. Propertius writes that Apollo bent his bow from the stern of Augustus's ship. After the victory, Augustus built Apollo a temple on the Palatine Hill, joined to his own house by a ramp. Inside stood a statue of the god by the sculptor Scopas. He transferred the Sibylline Books there from Jupiter's temple on the Capitoline. They now sat under his roof.

The Carmen Saeculare

In 17 BCE, Augustus held the Secular Games to mark a new age. He commissioned Horace to write the hymn. A chorus of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls sang it first on the Palatine, then on the Capitol, asking Apollo and Diana to guard Rome's mothers and harvests, to keep its poets singing and its armies strong.