Abstract

Authorities on Apollo and Apollo cults are still divided into two camps. Some believe the god to have been Anatolian—Homeric god of the Troad, god of Branchidae and Lycia, a hawk-god, Smintheus, Lykios, with a western outpost at Carian-Ionian Delos, worshipped too in Crete, whence he passed to Pytho. In the other camp Apollo is, at least in part, believed to be a northerner, fair-haired, descending on Greece from the land of the Hyperboreans, the people ‘Behind the Beyond.’ And the mainstay of those who claim a partially northern origin for Apollo is in tales which both at Delos and at Delphi link him with the Hyperboreans.