ZBORNIK - Matica srpska

his brother Hermes' heralds then routinely mix and serve. Although
a prehistoric Caucasian-South Balkan god may be named “Apollo"
only by an interpretatio Hellanica, it is not only through his vineyardist-priest
Maron that Apollo has vinous association in the Odyssey.
The uyoskÃoj, “priest-seer" Leodes, “son of Oenops/Wine-
-face" according to Od. 21.144 will be sentenced to death, justly,
and executed with another weapon of Apollo, a sword, at the end of
the Battle of Book 22 (318—329), for the son of Zeus and Leto is
both silver bow and golden sword, xrysÀor(oj) (Hymns No. 3, l.
123, and 27, l. 3; and so he calls himself at Il. 15.256).
We are not quite finished with Phoebus. Hymn No. 9, the first
and shorter of two to Artemis (the longer is the musical No. 27
already mentioned assigns to Leto's daughter a familiar share in her
twin brother's use of a lethal bow and arrows. We also know about
her archery from epic; the Iliad-poet reports how as “streamer of
arrows" she killed Andromache's mother ('/Artemij øoxçaira, 6.428).
This was an act not of punishment but of mercy; wearing the same
epithet, however, she executed the evil Phoenician slave woman
who kidnapped the royal boy Eumaeus according to the Odyssey
(15.478). The same little hymn of nine lines also describes her as a
charioteer, which facilitates her later syncretistic identification with
Moon-goddess (whose lustrous team and vehicle Hymn No. 32 describes).
She drives to a rendezvous with her Silverbow twin. However,
that glorious brother is no charioteer himself! For example, he
is finally no help to Eumelus, the son of his dear friend Admetus
(Apollo's friendship with whom we know best from Euripides' play
Alcestis). During Eumelus' chariot race against Diomedes in Iliad
23 Phoebus Apollo attempts to influence the outcome by knocking
the Argive hero's whip mÀsiq, “whip", away. Athena counteracts
this. She restores the implement to her darling and wrecks his competitor's
chariot, causing him disfiguring facial injuries (383—397).
In the Theban cycle prophet Amphiaraus' chariot is swallowed
into the ground, horses and all; and in Sophocles Electra another
protégé of the god, Orestes, employs a fatal chariot accident in a
plausible lie. Could this be why Apollo's darling Hector has so
much trouble in his bouts of chariot-fighting, losing a series of drivers?
Artemis' friend, tragic Hippolytus, on the other hand, is an
accomplished charioteer until horse-god Poseidon reluctantly interferes.
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