We’ve been hearing a lot about Apollo in rehearsal lately! Every character seems to have his name on their lips. Apollo is the most frequently-referenced god in the entire text of Oedipus Rex; no small wonder, with a play that deals so much with his spheres of influence!
Apollo is a complicated god, as is every member of his pantheon, but he can be boiled down to a few core elements.
· Apollo reveals the truth. Though it might be obscured in riddles or shrouded in mystery, Apollo strives to shed light into dark places. He may make it difficult, but it will be done.
· Apollo does not suffer lawbreakers. Unlike his half-brother Dionysus (and even Hermes, who has some significant trickster tendencies), Apollo is representative of the rule of law. He even appears in Eumenides as Orestes’ defense lawyer, arguing in his favor and thereby helping to establish the fictional origins of Athenian democracy.
· Apollo is healing as much as he is disease and he brings both in equal measure.
· Apollo is a keeper of knowledge. Law, music, poetry and song are all within his domain.
· Apollo is clarity, precision, revelation. He is the archer that never misses the mark. He is song and poetry where no line or note is out of tune. He is the light of the sun, which nourishes as much as it burns.
Below are some excerpts from the larger concordance written for this play; I have selected the textual references to Apollo and provided some context.
Page 3: “Delphi”
The seat of Apollo’s Oracle (also called the Pythia or the Delphic Oracle), Delphi is located approximately 100km (as the crow flies) from Thebes and is considered to be one of the most sacred sites in the Ancient Greek landscape. The Oracle served as both the high priestess of Apollo and the deliverer of his prophecies, oftentimes in cryptic or riddling form, other times in much more direct warnings or pronouncements (as is the case most often in Oedipus Rex). Her words were considered to be direct communication from Apollo and the Oracle was thought to be a vessel into which the God would enter and speak. This process was aided by the inhalation of vapors (volcanic fumes from below the earth, over which the Delphic complex is built), which would send the priestess into an altered state of consciousness from which the prophecy would spring. The Pythia was attended by a small army of priests and acolytes who also served as interpreters for the more difficult-to-decipher utterances.
23: “neither the birds of the air nor the configurations of the stars”
Bird-omens and astrology were two of the main tools by which prophets and seers foretold the future. Bird-omens in particular have heavy Homeric ancestry and were considered the exclusive purview of Apollo and his seers.
56: “no more will I seek the mystery/buried in the earth’s deep core”
The Greek of this line translates more literally as ‘no more may I go in reverence to the navel of the earth’, a reference to Delphi and, more specifically, to the omphalos, a stone monument thought to mark the exact center of the world.
56: “Delphi, Elis, or Olympus”
Elis refers to a Western region of the Peloponnese (the peninsula south of the Greek mainland), the location of Olympia (not Mount Olympus, but rather the city in which the Olympic games were hosted). The primary locations of note there were temples and other sacred sites dedicated to Zeus. Additionally, there was a lesser Oracle of Apollo located in Elis, as there were in multiple scattered regions on the Greek mainland and islands (Delphi being the chief among them).
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