Hi
I’ve seen websites designating Apollo as god or war. Is this correct? Ares (god of war) and Athena (goddess of strategy??) is what I was taught.
Did the Spartans worship Apollo as god of war?
I look forward to your feedback.
Is the idea of god being formally “of” something that existed in the anceint world? I thought it was more that certain gods had certain attributes (and were associated with particular cities) so were more likely to be called on in certain circumstances.
So Ares had a tendency to charge in “Leeroy Jenkins” style and start hacking at people. If that was the thought of endeavor you were beginning, you’d ask for his favor.
The only formal attributes I’ve heard of gods being described is the adjectives associated with them “grey-eyed Athena” (most likely a hold over from oral story telling)
Certain Greek cities had gods as patrons; when the cities went to war, I guess their gods became gods of war by default.
Also, to the Spartans, EVERYTHING was about war.
It depends, but I’m thinking it probably is. Which websites? What’s the context? As the above posters point out, it’s a bit too simplistic to say that the Greek gods had this or that specific job. Furthermore, Apollo did get into the action a bit in the Trojan War, and he slayed the Python once, for which he is somewhat associated with battle. But even so, being connected to war is pretty darned far down on his to-do list for any given week, as far as I know.
I have never heard Apollo referred to as a God of War, although during the Trojan War practically every God played a part.
It may help to keep in mind that the Greeks and Romans did not compile a “Bible.” There was never a single authority that spelled out who was in charge of what. Rather, what we call their “mythology” is a collection of stories cribbed together from various cities, cults, and nations which sometimes conformed and sometimes contradicted. There is no definitive reference, so my advice is to not think about it too hard.
Reading the Wikipedia article on Apollo (yeah, I know, not necessarily a scholarly source) suggests that one of his roles was that of a protector (which is an aspect of war), and that he was also sometimes seen as a god of battle and victory.
As has already been noted, it’s probably an oversimplification to ascribe certain “spheres” only to certain gods in many of those mythologies; it likely varied a lot over time, as well as by location. Plus, it seems like there were just a lot of different aspects which were attached to Apollo at some point.
Thanks Kenobi. Thank you all
It’s not just that – we tend to see the God relationships and hierarchies of the Graeco-Roman deities as if they were fixed in that form for all time. But there’s evidence that this was not the case, and that in certain areas and early times Apollo was seen as a chief god. In that way, he’d effectively be “the god of war”. Other gods similarly were held to be more important elsewhere.
That said, I can’t say I’ve ever come across anything that explicitly declared Apollo “the god of war” at any time or place.
No encyclopedias are. Their sources can be.