Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

Apollon and Artemis 455
Lycian custom' the metronymic Letoides, that his sister was a
barbaric goddess equated by the Greeks with their own Artemis,
that the birth of the twins was located at Araxa in Lykia^ that their
' mother Leto bears a native name (the Lycian lada meaning wife '*),
that the DeUan Apollon was believed to winter in Lykia^ and that
the earliest cult-poetry of Delos was attributed to the Lycian Olenl
Hence Wilamowitz concludes that Leto and her twins were essentially
Asiatic (Lato Asidtis was worshipped at Argos''), belonging by rights
to the Lycians in their original abode, that the cult of all three had
before the arrival of the Greeks in Asia Minor already spread to
Delos and Crete, and that it passed over from the islands to the mainland
of Greece, where Apollon usurped the position of this, that, and
the oUier older deity. M. P. Nilsson (1906)' accepts in the main the
results reached by Wilamowitz and seeks to support them by certain
heortological considerations. He observes that in Greece, apart
from the great cult-centres of Delos, Delphoi, and Mount Ptoion,
the chief festivals of Apollon are precisely those in which the god
appears as an intruder^ ; that Apolline festivals are comparatively
rare on the Greek mainland, much more frequent in the islands and
in Asia Minor ; that Apollon has a higher percentage of appellations
derived from place-names than any other god, his worship, as a
missionary cult, being widely disseminated, and his numerous
epiphanies suggesting that in many places he was invoked to quit
\vKy\yiv{]% in the sense of 'born in Lykia.' For other interpretations see O. Hofer in
Roscher Lex. Myth. ii. 2174 f. and Frazer Pausanias ii. 195 f.
' Hdt. I. 173 with the note of J. Wells ad loc. See further O. Benndorf—G. Niemann
Keisen in Lykien itnd Karien VVien 1884 p. 73, Sir VV. M. Ramsay The Cities and
Bishoprics of Phrygia Oxford 1895 i. 94
Paris 1916 p. 109 f.
ff., G. Dottin Les aticiens peiiples de PEttrope
^ O. Benndorf— G. Niemann op. cit. p. 76 f. inscription no. 53 b, 9 ff. iKrarhv (?) Se
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