Lyfing
10-07-2009, 08:02 PM
Apollo, by Fritz Graf.. (http://www.mediafire.com/file/jqzz5rvtonm/Fritz.Graf-Apollo.pdf)
Fritz Graf here presents a survey of a god once thought of as the most powerful of gods, and capable of great wrath should he be crossed: Apollo the sun god.
From his first attestations in Homer, through the complex question of pre-Homeric Apollo, to the opposition between Apollo and Dionysos in nineteenth and twentieth-century thinking, Graf examines Greek religion and myth to provide a full account of Apollo in the ancient world.
For students of Greek religion and culture, of myth and legend, and in the fields of art and literature, Apollo will provide an informative and enlightening introduction to this powerful figure from the past.
http://www.routledge-ny.com/books/Apollo-isbn9780415317115
APOLLO’S FLOURISHING AFTERMATH
Apollo’s history did not end with his second adoption in Rome, as Augustus’ personal deity after the battle of Actium (31 BCE), or with the myth that he had been born on a British island. During the Imperial Epoch, the god received worship in many sanctuaries throughout the Roman provinces. Many centuries before the city became the capital of Charlemagne’s renewed Roman Empire, Aachen in Germany had a famous healing sanctuary of Apollo Grannus: the emperor Caracalla, always in search of cures for his many ailments, spent some time there. At the other end of the Empire, the god had a splendid sanctuary in Daphne, a suburb of Antioch (Antakya) in Syria; it was famous for its colossal cult image made of gold and ivory (chryselephantine). Julian, the last pagan emperor, had the temple restored for his own visit to the city in the fall of 362 CE; following the lead of Augustus, he stylized himself as a new Apollo. The Antiochean cult
had been brought by Greek settlers; the cult in Aachen continued the worship of an indigenous god who had been identified with Apollo. This was very common: all over the ancient world, local gods could be regarded as the native forms of Apollo, such as Phanebal in Ascalon, Reshef in Palmyra, Grannus in Gaul, or Maponos in Britain. The reasons varied: Phanebal “Messenger of Ba’al” was a young and warlike god, Reshef was the local variation of the Ugaritic and Phoenician plague god Reshep, and Grannus and
Maponos presided over healing springs.
Julian’s restoration of the sanctuary of Daphne was an act of defiance, aimed at the Christian hostility to pagan cults. It strikes one as highly symbolic that the sanctuary burned down shortly after Julian’s arrival, and presumably it was meant that way; certainly this was how Julian understood the blaze. In the last decade of the fourth century CE, the emperor Theodosius promulgated several edicts in which he declared the performance of pagan ritual as unlawful. Bands of fanaticized monks swarmed out to destroy major and minor sanctuaries that were still operative despite the adverse conditions during much of the century. Books of magic – the label magic had been tagged on all sorts of pagan ritual – went up in flames in many places; and eager bishops kept their congregations from lapsing into forbidden rites. Pagan cult went underground, and slowly died out over the course of the following century. But the gods survived, although somewhat precariously sometimes, not in the prayers of their worshippers, but on the pages of books and in works of art. Crucial for Apollo’s survival in Christian times was his identification with Helios/Sol, parallel to Artemis’ identification with Selene/Luna. Stoic and Neoplatonist philosophers adopted this interpretation of the twin gods: this secured them a prestigious place among the planets. This survived into the Middle Ages and beyond: Renaissance painters regularly depicted Apollo as the sun-god, riding in a chariot, his head surrounded by rays. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
another important aspect of Apollo was his patronage and inspiration of music and poetry; early modern poets stressed his association with Orpheus, the Muses and the Graces. In the mid-eighteenth century, the beauty of youthful Apollo, alluded to occasionally in earlier epochs, became essential for Winckelmann’s classicist reading of Greek art; a marble statue of Apollo in the Vatican, the Belvedere Apollo, was emblematical for this new view of the Greeks that blended aesthetic and sexual attraction (figure 10). Apollo’s “noble simplicity and restrained greatness” (“edle Einfalt und stille
Grösse,” in Winckelmann’s often quoted German phrase) became influential again more than a century later when Friedrich Nietzsche emphasized the tension between Apollo and Dionysus that had, in his reading, created Athenian tragedy and Wagnerian opera.
In this final chapter I will sketch the history of the god Apollo through these centuries, from the Roman Empire to modern times. Although the territory is by no means uncharted, there exist no comprehensive accounts of all the works that Apollo has inspired and of all the learned pronouncements about the god during almost two millennia. What follows, then, can only be a preliminary sketch, dictated more by the author’s idiosyncrasies and predilections than by historical evidence.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/jqzz5rvtonm/Fritz.Graf-Apollo.pdf
Later,
-Lyfing
Fritz Graf here presents a survey of a god once thought of as the most powerful of gods, and capable of great wrath should he be crossed: Apollo the sun god.
From his first attestations in Homer, through the complex question of pre-Homeric Apollo, to the opposition between Apollo and Dionysos in nineteenth and twentieth-century thinking, Graf examines Greek religion and myth to provide a full account of Apollo in the ancient world.
For students of Greek religion and culture, of myth and legend, and in the fields of art and literature, Apollo will provide an informative and enlightening introduction to this powerful figure from the past.
http://www.routledge-ny.com/books/Apollo-isbn9780415317115
APOLLO’S FLOURISHING AFTERMATH
Apollo’s history did not end with his second adoption in Rome, as Augustus’ personal deity after the battle of Actium (31 BCE), or with the myth that he had been born on a British island. During the Imperial Epoch, the god received worship in many sanctuaries throughout the Roman provinces. Many centuries before the city became the capital of Charlemagne’s renewed Roman Empire, Aachen in Germany had a famous healing sanctuary of Apollo Grannus: the emperor Caracalla, always in search of cures for his many ailments, spent some time there. At the other end of the Empire, the god had a splendid sanctuary in Daphne, a suburb of Antioch (Antakya) in Syria; it was famous for its colossal cult image made of gold and ivory (chryselephantine). Julian, the last pagan emperor, had the temple restored for his own visit to the city in the fall of 362 CE; following the lead of Augustus, he stylized himself as a new Apollo. The Antiochean cult
had been brought by Greek settlers; the cult in Aachen continued the worship of an indigenous god who had been identified with Apollo. This was very common: all over the ancient world, local gods could be regarded as the native forms of Apollo, such as Phanebal in Ascalon, Reshef in Palmyra, Grannus in Gaul, or Maponos in Britain. The reasons varied: Phanebal “Messenger of Ba’al” was a young and warlike god, Reshef was the local variation of the Ugaritic and Phoenician plague god Reshep, and Grannus and
Maponos presided over healing springs.
Julian’s restoration of the sanctuary of Daphne was an act of defiance, aimed at the Christian hostility to pagan cults. It strikes one as highly symbolic that the sanctuary burned down shortly after Julian’s arrival, and presumably it was meant that way; certainly this was how Julian understood the blaze. In the last decade of the fourth century CE, the emperor Theodosius promulgated several edicts in which he declared the performance of pagan ritual as unlawful. Bands of fanaticized monks swarmed out to destroy major and minor sanctuaries that were still operative despite the adverse conditions during much of the century. Books of magic – the label magic had been tagged on all sorts of pagan ritual – went up in flames in many places; and eager bishops kept their congregations from lapsing into forbidden rites. Pagan cult went underground, and slowly died out over the course of the following century. But the gods survived, although somewhat precariously sometimes, not in the prayers of their worshippers, but on the pages of books and in works of art. Crucial for Apollo’s survival in Christian times was his identification with Helios/Sol, parallel to Artemis’ identification with Selene/Luna. Stoic and Neoplatonist philosophers adopted this interpretation of the twin gods: this secured them a prestigious place among the planets. This survived into the Middle Ages and beyond: Renaissance painters regularly depicted Apollo as the sun-god, riding in a chariot, his head surrounded by rays. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
another important aspect of Apollo was his patronage and inspiration of music and poetry; early modern poets stressed his association with Orpheus, the Muses and the Graces. In the mid-eighteenth century, the beauty of youthful Apollo, alluded to occasionally in earlier epochs, became essential for Winckelmann’s classicist reading of Greek art; a marble statue of Apollo in the Vatican, the Belvedere Apollo, was emblematical for this new view of the Greeks that blended aesthetic and sexual attraction (figure 10). Apollo’s “noble simplicity and restrained greatness” (“edle Einfalt und stille
Grösse,” in Winckelmann’s often quoted German phrase) became influential again more than a century later when Friedrich Nietzsche emphasized the tension between Apollo and Dionysus that had, in his reading, created Athenian tragedy and Wagnerian opera.
In this final chapter I will sketch the history of the god Apollo through these centuries, from the Roman Empire to modern times. Although the territory is by no means uncharted, there exist no comprehensive accounts of all the works that Apollo has inspired and of all the learned pronouncements about the god during almost two millennia. What follows, then, can only be a preliminary sketch, dictated more by the author’s idiosyncrasies and predilections than by historical evidence.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/jqzz5rvtonm/Fritz.Graf-Apollo.pdf
Later,
-Lyfing