Analogopotom » 12 ноя 2007, 13:28
Об Аполлоне, как боге чумы - всего один абзац.
(Из какой энциклопедии статья пояснит Лусор).
2.5 Apollo
Apollo' has often been described, not without reason, as the 'most Greek of the gods'.2 And even if we have long been rid of the misconception that all archaic kouros statues represent Apollo, it is still true that that sculpted ideal of the treasured akme of physical development may stand for Apollo above all other gods, at least from the time of those hammered bronze figures from the Apollo temple at Dreros.3 That the youth, the kouros, was raised to its ideal, gives Greek culture as a whole its peculiar character;4 purified and elevated, this ideal is manifest in the divine; the god of this culture is Apollo.
The worship of Apollo is spread throughout the Greek world,5 and Pervades both the state and the private domain. Important and notably early temples and cult statues belong to the god; theophoric names such as Peiles, Apollonios, Apollodorus, are exceedingly common.6 A peculiarity of Apollo cult is that it has two supra-regional centres which exert nothing short of a missionary influence: Delos and Pytho-Delphi;7 sanctuaries dedicated specifically to the Delian or the Pythian god are found in many places, often even next to one another. Festal envoys were regularly dispatched from these to the central sanctuary; for communication among the Greeks and their sense of common identity this played a very important role.8 Delos, a small island without springs, was the central market and common sanctuary of the Cyclades; Delphi, with its out-of-the-way location owed its popularity to the oracle. Its great rise to fame coincides with the period of colonization; Apollo the Leader was soon worshipped from Sicily in the west to Phasis on the Sea of Azov, and far from a few cities were named Apollonia.9
The diffusion of the Apollo cult is already complete at the time when our written sources begin, about 700. In the epics, Apollo is one of the most important gods. In spite of this, the impression remains that Apollo is not only a youthful god, but also a young god for the Greeks. There is no clear evidence for him in Linear B.I0 On Delos, the real mistress of the sanctuary is Artemis; the earliest temple, constructed about 700, belongs to her as does the famous Horn Altar; Apollo's temple lies at the periphery, though it did contain the monumental, gilded image." In Delphi, the central temenos always belonged to Apollo, but it was not founded before the eighth century;12 that the neigh bouring precinct of the Earth is older, is something known only to mythology. The belief that the great Apollo festivals Karneia, Hyakinthia, and Daphnephoria were initially celebrated without Apollo, is a conjecture13 which leads back into the dark age.
It seemed for a time to be firmly established that Apollo was an Asia Minor, or more specifically, a Lycian god; one of his most frequent epithets is Lykeios; the Iliad connects him with Lycia; and besides, he is an enemy of the Greeks in the Homeric epic. Furthermore, it was believed that Hittite connections could be discovered behind this. Increasing knowledge of the Late Hittite and Lycian languages has meant that at least the derivation of the name has had to be abandoned; an inscription published in 1974 has proved conclusively that Apollo is not a Lycian divine name.'4 There remain remarkable and probably ancient connections between Delos and Lycia, and there is also the series of Apollo oracles running along the coast of Asia Minor from Daphne near Antiocheia via Mallos and Mopsuestia in Cilicia, Patara in Lycia, and Telmessos in Caria to Didyma and Klaros, Gryneion and Zeleia. Later, in the wake of Hellenization, Asia Minor city and province gods were often called Apollo. But that the god as such, with name, cult, and myth, is imported is impossible to prove.
At least three components in the prehistory of Apollo worship can be discerned with some clarity: a Dorian-northwest Greek component, a Cretan-Minoan component, and a Syro-Hittite component. The name in the earlier, pre-Homeric form Apellon is scarcely to be separated from the institution 0 the apellai, annual gatherings of the tribal or phratry organization such as are attested in Delphi and Laconia, and which, from the month name Apellainos, can be inferred for the entire Dorian-northwest Greek area.15 One of the earliest Apollo temples has been identified in Thermos, the centre for the annual gatherings of the Aetolians.'6 An important act on such an occasion the admission of new members, youths who have come of age: the apellai are of necessity an initiation festival as well. Apellon the ephebos stands accordingly on the threshold of manhood, but still with the long hair of the boy: akersekomas, with unshorn hair, has been an epithet of Apollo since the Iliad.'1 He is an epitome of that turning-point in the flower of youth, telos hebes, which the ephebos has attained and which he also leaves behind with the festival which gains him admittance to the society of men; the image of the god remains an image distanced and preserved. With the tribal gathering and the society of men one can also connect the epithet Lykeios, the wolf-like, and perhaps Phoibos (the fox-like?),18 and Delphidios/Delphinios unquestionably belongs in this context.'9
Apollo's cult hymn is the paean. In Greek-ruled Knossos, Paiawon is an independent god, and in the Iliad, Paean can still be distinguished from Apollo, although at the same time paieon is the healing hymn which appeases Apollo's wrath.20 The intimate connection between god and hymn seems to derive from Minoan tradition; literary sources tell that the Cretan paean was taken from Crete to Sparta as a healing hymn and dance at the beginning of the seventh century;21 the paean is particularly associated with the Hyakinthia festival at Amyklai.
These Dorian and Cretan traditions, however, are unable to explain why Apollo appears with a bow and arrow when he is not a god of hunters, and why he is specifically associated with the stag or roe and even has a lion in his train. In the first book of the Iliad, the arrows of Apollo signify pestilence: the god of healing is also the god of plague, this points to the Semitic god Resep who as plague god shoots firebrands; in Ugarit and on Cyprus he is called Resep of the Arrow, and in both places he is accompanied by a lion; he is regularly equated with Apollo. The Apollo sanctuary of Amyklai perhaps preserves the name of the Semitic Resep (A)mukal who was worshipped on Cyprus.22 The special role of the number seven in the Apollo cult must derive from Semitic tradition.23 Bronze statuettes which found their way to Greece in not inconsiderable numbers during the dark age represent not only Resep, but also the Hittite Guardian God who is associated with the stag, in contrast with the bull of the Weather God; the stag god is also portrayed with bow and arrow. That Cyprus after 1200 acted as a melting-pot for Anatolian, Semitic, and Greek elements may be surmised; in a Cypriot Apollo cult, the cult of Apollo Alasiotas, the Bronze Age name for Cyprus survived.24 Much still remains in the dark, not least where and how the Leto-Apollo-Artemis trio came into being.25
Youthfully pure renewal at the annual gathering, the banishment of disease in song and dance, and the image of the arrow-bearing Guardian God are brought together in one vision; that a unified figure emerged from these elements is due probably more than in the case of other gods to the Power of poetry. At the same time, the poets or rather bards placed themselves most particularly under the protection of Apollo. Already in the first book of the Iliad Apollo is introduced in a double role: night-like he comes to send the plague, the arrows clatter across his shoulders, and the string of his bow clangs terribly. Animals and men are felled until at last the god is appeased. But on Mount Olympus in the company of the gods, Apollo himself plays the 'all-beautiful phorminx', the stringed instrument, and the Muses sing alternately with beautiful voices.26 The same dual aspect is apparent in the ancient Hymn to Apollo: When Apollo enters Olympus with his dread bow all the gods spring to their feet; only Leto his mother remains seated; she takes the bow and quiver from her son and shows him to his seat-she rejoices that she has given birth to a mighty, bow-carrying son. Then again Apollo is shown striding across the earth to Delphi and beyond playing on the lyre while the rich-tressed Charites dance with Artemis and Aphrodite; radiance shines forth from Apollo as he dances at the centre striking the strings of his lyre.2'
The plague god is at the same time master of the healing hymn; this association of bow and lyre is crystallized into a single image: the bow sings and the lyre sends forth sound. The unity of bow and lyre is articulated by Heraclitus28 as 'a fitting together turned back on itself`, palintropos harmonia, in the sense that 'that which is drawn apart becomes one with itself.' The colossal cult statue of Apollo on Delos held the three Charites, the Graces, in its right hand, and the bow in its left hand: according to the interpretation of Callimachus, this signified that the favour of the god is prior to, and stronger than the destructive power.29
The arrow strikes from a distance; 'striking from afar' is how Apollo's epithets hekatebolos, hekebolos and hekatos have been understood.30 The hymn rises up and dies away: Apollo is not always tangibly near, in spite of the statue. For this reason, the birth myth, his first epiphany, is so much more important than in the case of Zeus or Poseidon. Following the pattern for the birth of a king child, the myth tells of the sufferings of the mother who wandered through the world finding no resting place until she chanced on the tiny island of Delos. There, by the date palm, Leto gave birth, and the whole of Delos was bathed in ambrosial fragrance, the prodigious earth laughed, and even the depths of the sea rejoiced.3' Something of the resplendent glory of this first hour has always remained on Delos and was seen in the beauty of the palm and of the circular lake.
Apollo is always summoned anew to the festival through the paean, even to Delos; he is away in Lycia, it was said,32 or else in the far north beyond mighty mountains among that pious people the Hyperboreans. Mycenaean graves on Delos were worshipped as the graves of Hyperborean Maidens who had formerly come to Delos;33 gifts which arrived in Delos via Apollonia in Epirus and Dodona, perhaps traversing the amber route from the nortn, were regarded as offerings from the Hyperboreans.34 In Delphi also, Apollo`s epiphany at the festival could be presented as his advent from the land of tne Hyperboreans; a hymn by Alcaeus described how Apollo appears on a swandrawn carriage; nightingales and swallows sing, crickets chirp, the Castalian stream flows silver, and the Delphic tripod rings.35 An even earlier vase painting shows Apollo on a chariot drawn by winged horses with two female figures, perhaps Hyperborean Maidens, standing behind him; he is being greeted by Artemis, probably as Mistress of Delos.36 In the cult, Apollo's advent is also represented by the bearing of bay branches to his sanctuary, the Daphnephoria.37
The bow god is dangerous. With the help of Artemis, he kills without mercy all the children of Niobe who had boasted of her many offspring and offended Leto.38 Achilles also dies by the arrow of Apollo; but here, as with Artemis and Iphigeneia, a near identity of god and victim is at play; it is Achilles the youth, with hair unshorn and still unmarried, who falls to the youthful god. Neoptolemos, the son of Achilles, meets a grisly end in the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi and so becomes the hero who presides over all sacrificial festivals.39 The dividing lines become clearer when Apollo is slaying monsters - the giant Tityos who tried to rape Leto,40 or the dragon at Delphi. The dragon fight is a freely transferable motif; the name and even sex of the Delphic dragon are variously recorded; the version which eventually gained currency named the serpent Python, a son of Earth and Lord of Delphi until killed by the arrows of Apollo.41 The Pythian agon was regarded as a celebration of this victory.
At all Apollo festivals the music of Apollo is present in the choruses of boys and girls; the Pythian festival in particular always involved a musical agon, a competition for voice and lyre, voice and flute, and solo flute, even though popular interest later tended to centre on the sporting events, especially the horse races. The victor was presented with a laurel wreath - a tradition revived in Renaissance times with the crowning of the poeta laureatus. For the Greeks, of course, the Muses are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; but Apollo is their leader, Mousagetes.
That Apollo is a god of healing rernains a central trait in his worship -from the mythical foundation of Didyma when Branchos, ancestor of the priestly line of the Branchidai, banished a plague,42 to the building of the well-preserved temple in the loriely mountains of Bassae in Arcadia, which was erected following the plague in 430 and dedicated to Apollo the Helper, Epikourios. The particular ailments of the ordinary man are later attended by Asklepios, but Asklepios is always the son of Apollo who is himself accorded the epithet Doctor, Iatros.
The god of the healing hyfnn might well be a magician god; Apollo is the very opposite, a god of purifications and cryptic oracles. With disease and bane, nosos in the widest sense, being interpreted as pollution, the bane is not Personified, but objectified; knowledge and personal responsibility come into Play: the person must discover the action which has brought about the Pollution and must eliminate the miasma through renewed action.44 This, of course, requires super-human knowledge: the god of purifications must also be an oracle god - however much the function of oracles later extends beyond the domain of cultic prescriptions. In Archaic times the oracles contributed to Apollo's fame more than anything else, although oracles do not always belong to his cult - the oracle on Delos, for example, ceased to function – and there are also Zeus oracles and oracles of the dead.45 Already in the Iliad the seer stands under the protection of Apollo; in the Hymn to Apollo the god proclaims: 'May the lyre be dear to me and the crooked bow, and to men I will utter in oracles the unerring counsels of Zeus.'46 In this function Apollo is especially close to his father Zeus: 'Loxias is prophet of his father Zeus.47 Nevetheless, it is the indirect and veiled revelation which belongs especially to Apollo; for this reason he is called Loxias, the Oblique; the obscure utterances of a medium possessed by the god are formulated in verses which are often intentionally ambiguous and indeterminate; often the just interpretation emerges only the second or third time as a result of painful experience. Even here, where the divine seemed particularly tangible to the ancients Apollo remains distant and beyond bidding.
Through the cultic prescriptions emanating from Delphi, the outlines of a universal morality overriding tradition and group interests may be discerned for the first time among the Greeks. It was Delphi which confirmed and inculcated the sense that murder demands atonement and at the same time affirmed that it is possible to overcome the catastrophe through expiation.48 In mythology Apollo himself is made subject to this law; after slaying the Cyclopes he is banished from Olympus, and after killing the Python he is obliged to leave Delphi and seek purification in the distant Tempe valley in Thessaly.49 Following Aeschylus, it was also imagined that he had personally carried out the bloody purification of Orestes in the temple at Delphi.50 In the last book of the Iliad, when Achilles is unable to come to terms with the death of Patroclus and continues to violate Hector's corpse, Apollo protests as the advocate of purity: 'He disfigures the dumb earth in his fury... The Moirai gave men a heart that can endure.'5' Man is able to make an end with things and to start afresh in awareness of his own limited term.
In the sixth century the temple at Delphi was engraved with sayings - the form in which wisdom was then encapsulated - which were later attributed to the Seven Wise Men.52 Two of these sayings in particular express the spirit of Apollo, which is wisdom and morality at once: meden agan, nothing in excess, and gnothi sauton, know yourself; the latter, as has long been recognized, is not intended in a psychological sense or in the existential-philosophical sense of Socrates, but in an anthropological sense: know that you are not a god. An ethics of the human emerges, but it is closer to pessimism than to a programme for human progress.
Apollo remains the 'God of Afar';53 man knows himself in his distance frorn the god. This once again is already expressed in the Iliad. Poseidon and Apollo meet in the battle of the gods, but Apollo refuses to take up the challenge: 'Shaker of the earth, you could not say I was sound of mind if I were to go to war with you for the sake of pitiful mortals who now like leaves break forth full of fire, feeding on the fruits of the earth, and then waste away, heartless.54 With this gesture of infinite superiority the god turns away from all mankind, pious and impious, pure and impure alike. But men who are mindful of this god in awareness of their own misery venture forth on something higher, something absolute; recognition of the limit signifies that the limited portion is not all. Even the all-too-human receives light and form from that distance. It made manifest sense, although it was also a constriction, when, from the fifth century onwards, Apollo began to be understood as a sun god.55
