Thursday, September 13, 2007

Apollo, my guy

After our stay in Tel Aviv, Peleg and I flew to Athens and then took a cruise stopping at several Greek isles, Turkey, and ending in Venice. At our stop on Mykonos I took a tour to the nieghboring island of Delos which was the center of ancient Greek worship of Apollo, and his supposed birthplace.

Apollo is the god of medicine, music and beauty, and also the god of the sun. But interestingly Apollo was not the chief god of the Greek pantheon, that was Zeus. Apollo is the son of Zeus. He and his twin sister, Artemis, are the children of Zeus' affair with the minor goddess Leto. In most cultures the sun is associated with the chief deity. In Greece the sun god is the son of the chief deity. Zeus is the god of the sky, and Apollo drives his chariot through the sky, thus the sky is more important that the sun which simply moves across it.

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