0. Apollo is inscrutable. I’m at first unable to even roughly sketch his domain, in the way I can for Aphrodite (love) or Poseidon (the sea). But one of his Homeric hymns has the faintest whiff of answers.

1. First let’s delineate the scope of the hymns, so that my bout of logorrhea stains only what is just. The hymns are short precursors to other poems. Of the ones that are narrative, some are comedic (such as the one to Hermes) and others tragic (like the one to Demeter). None were authored by “Homer.” None are normative religious prescriptions.

2. Apollo’s longest hymn narrates his genesis and coming-of-age, which are apparently concurrent. The newborn god, still dewy with afterbirth, patrons three domains in his first words:

Εἴη μοι κίθαρίς [1 lyre] τε φίλη καὶ καμπύλα τόξα [2 curved bow]·
χρήσω [3 to proclaim oracles] <δ ̓> ἀνθρώποισι Διὸς νημερτέα βουλήν [infallible counsel or will].

He then embarks on a panhellenic tour, with the bard name-dropping so many Greek locales that the poem evokes a tedious compression of Iliad‘s catalog of ships (as to what this might imply, cf. § 10 & Bacchae lns.480-5).

3. Apollo’s choices require neither deliberation nor parental imposition; their immediacy after birth suggests they arise from something innate. Perhaps, they arise from a kind of tutelary principle, by virtue of which a God is particular to his realm and from which it makes sense to assign him discrete qualities, personalities, and choices.

Ares, for example, “acts” in the homeric epics as one would expect of a choleric god of war. We are, in other words, matching a personality to sub- or supernatural forces, a literary counterpart to the Subsaharan mask.

4. But “lyre, bow, and prophecy” are odiously multiple and particular. We must extract a single, general principle. A comparison of the former two reveals something quite obvious—both the lyre and the bow are rooted in the same “plucking” motion of the string. In oracular prophesy, this “plucking” is tentatively emulated in the peripatetic springing between Zeus and humans. (Think of the motion of a just-plucked guitar string: place Mt. Olympus at curve’s zenith and earth at the nadir.) This “plucking” is the subnatural force. It is Apollo. For plucking is but a physical analog of tension and release. And, indeed, this force underlies all of Apollo’s realms. His physical items are synecdoches for the fields of which they are means:

6. First, the lyre. Much of the pleasure I receive in music is from the interplay between tension and release. The departure and return to the ^1—both in harmony and melody—is stimulating. Literally, it escapes mono-tony. Apollo is, by the same token, god of all the muses. For each of them rule over particular arts sustained by this tension/release—which is easily apparent in, say, tragedy and comedy. And it’s tentatively apparent in astronomy. (Classical) astronomy seems to chart a push-and-pull identifiable with the principle. Ptolemy makes this somewhat evident in the tight- and looseness in Venus’s epicycle, which I’ve animated here:

Note that all these arts are arts of motion. There is no muse of painting, and for good reason. To attempt a transmutation of mobile tension/release to a static plane is inappropriate, a folly of Western art.

7. Second, the bow. Violence and war require a populace strung and volatile. Any propelling event—no matter how minor or unethical—is sufficient to loose the string. The result is, of course, slaughter, a pharmakos to bloodlet the social tension, as in human sacrifice. If one is attuned to these forces, they can effectively chart the societal roots of this tension, as well as its consequences in the release. This unveils the need for a muse of history. Such is also the root of social commentary in the vein of Lysistrata.

8. As illustrated in § 4, the oracle seems to function as only the post-pluck release. Release of what? Of not-knowing. If I told you, for example, that the country will engage in total war with no clear outcomes, you would shiver with tension of this sort. An oracle, delivering the Διὸς νημερτέα βουλήν, the infallible will of Zeus, is surety, a verse-balm. Relevant is the true-sense of οἶδα (to know, through having seen) and Oedipus’s stabbing of his eyes as a “release” from knowing.

9. Where does this ubiquitous principle come from? I think it is an atavistic urge, predating sapio, homo, maybe even mammalia, but not animalia. Sex is one likely primordial cause, the tension of foreplay, the release of the orgasm. But tension/release may, concurrently, source from sex’s function, as the poem alludes to. Apollo’s selection of domains is precipitated by a “loosening of the tight, golden chord” that he was wrapped in after his birth. There is the tension in the physical swelling of pregnancy, a release in childbirth. I can’t see a reducible antecedent.

10. This unveils Apollo as god of healing. Tension drives waste expulsion, be it in delivering an infant, or popping a blister. A visceral example is the removal of a splinter from your eye—a motif, unsurprisingly, in Lysistrata (e.g. ln.1200; cf. § 7). Is this healing then limited to the draining of physical impurities? No. It is the underlying mechanism of dramatic katharsis. I expel tension into the tension of the drama, and it is released, healed, destroyed in the superficial violence. The Apollonian principle, then, is a perpetual assertion of the self or social-self by stripping it of contamination. This may be in the form of dislodging muddy opinion through the cleansing river of dialectic, unveiling Apollo as god of knowledge (cf. § 8). He is the flowing from one opposite to the next, unclean to clean. And things in motion cannot be accounted for.