[25] The name of the Lydian god Qλdãns /kʷʎðãns/ may reflect an earlier /kʷalyán-/ before palatalization, syncope, and the pre-Lydian sound change *y > d.[26] Note the labiovelar in place of the labial /p/ found in pre-Doric Ἀπέλjων and Hittite Apaliunas.

In her earliest depictions she was accompanied by the "Master of the animals", a bow-wielding god of hunting whose name has been lost; aspects of this figure may have been absorbed into the more popular Apollo.

[92] The Greeks gave to him the name ἀγυιεύς agyieus as the protector god of public places and houses who wards off evil and his symbol was a tapered stone or column.

His oracular shrine in Abae in Phocis, where he bore the toponymic epithet Abaeus (Ἀπόλλων Ἀβαῖος, Apollon Abaios), was important enough to be consulted by Croesus.

[102] The Doric order dominated during the 6th and the 5th century BC but there was a mathematical problem regarding the position of the triglyphs, which could not be solved without changing the original forms.

[citation needed] The most important temples are: In the myths, Apollo is the son of Zeus, the king of the gods, and Leto, his previous wife[139] or one of his mistresses.

Upon tasting the divine food, the child broke free of the bands fastened onto him and declared that he would be the master of lyre and archery, and interpret the will of Zeus to humankind.

[citation needed] In myths, the tears of amber Apollo shed when his son Asclepius died mixed with the waters of the river Eridanos, which surrounded Hyperborea.

[169] To keep the child amused, the Delian nymphs ran around the altar beating it, and then with their hands tied behind their backs, bit an olive branch.

The cry let out by her, "ιε, παῖ" ("Shoot, boy") later got slightly altered as "ἰὴ παιών" (Hië paian), an exclamation to avert evils.

[189] Alcaeus narrates the following account: Zeus, who had adorned his newborn son with a golden headband, also provided him with a chariot driven by swans and instructed Apollo to visit Delphi to establish his laws among the people.

[220][221] For this act, he was banished to Tartarus and there he was pegged to the rock floor and stretched on an area of 9 acres (36,000 m2), while a pair of vultures feasted daily on his liver[215] or his heart.

Apollo immediately prophesied that Troy would fall at the hands of Aeacus's descendants, the Aeacidae (i.e. his son Telamon joined Heracles when he sieged the city during Laomedon's rule.

His body is fair from head to foot, his limbs shine bright, his tongue gives oracles, and he is equally eloquent in prose or verse, propose which you will.

But Apollo replied that since Marsyas played the flute, which needed air blown from the throat, it was similar to singing, and that either they both should get an equal chance to combine their skills or none of them should use their mouths at all.

They took it back to Apollo, but the god, who had decided to stay away from music for a while, laid away both the lyre and the pipes at Delphi and joined Cybele in her wanderings to as far as Hyperborea.

Though saddened that the seer was fated to be doomed in the war, Apollo made Amphiaraus' last hours glorious by "lighting his shield and his helm with starry gleam".

Later, when Creusa left Ion to die in the wild, Apollo asked Hermes to save the child and bring him to the oracle at Delphi, where he was raised by a priestess.

[302] Oh how often his sister (Diana) blushed at meeting her brother as he carried a young calf through the fields!....often Latona lamented when she saw her son's disheveled locks which were admired even by Juno, his step-mother...[303]When Admetus wanted to marry princess Alcestis, Apollo provided a chariot pulled by a lion and a boar he had tamed.

Arabus, Delphos, Dryops, Miletos, Tenes, Epidaurus, Ceos, Lycoras, Syrus, Pisus, Marathus, Megarus, Patarus, Acraepheus, Cicon, Chaeron and many other sons of Apollo, under the guidance of his words, founded eponymous cities.

[407] In Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, Clytemnestra kills her husband, King Agamemnon because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to proceed forward with the Trojan war.

In this interpretation, Apollo's title of Lykegenes can simply be read as "born in Lycia", which effectively severs the god's supposed link with wolves (possibly a folk etymology).

However, the Greeks thought of the two qualities as complementary: the two gods are brothers, and when Apollo at winter left for Hyperborea, he would leave the Delphic oracle to Dionysus.

"In the balance and relation of their limbs, such figures express their whole character, mental and physical, and reveal their central being, the radiant reality of youth in its heyday".

[429] Numerous free-standing statues of male youths from Archaic Greece exist, and were once thought to be representations of Apollo, though later discoveries indicated that many represented mortals.

[430] In 1895, V. I. Leonardos proposed the term kouros ("male youth") to refer to those from Keratea; this usage was later expanded by Henri Lechat in 1904 to cover all statues of this format.

[435] The life-size so-called "Adonis" found in 1780 on the site of a villa suburbana near the Via Labicana in the Roman suburb of Centocelle is identified as an Apollo by modern scholars.

In the late 2nd century CE floor mosaic from El Djem, Roman Thysdrus, he is identifiable as Apollo Helios by his effulgent halo, though now even a god's divine nakedness is concealed by his cloak, a mark of increasing conventions of modesty in the later Empire.

[436] The conventions of this representation, head tilted, lips slightly parted, large-eyed, curling hair cut in locks grazing the neck, were developed in the 3rd century BCE to depict Alexander the Great.

Percy Bysshe Shelley composed a "Hymn of Apollo" (1820), and the god's instruction of the Muses formed the subject of Igor Stravinsky's Apollon musagète (1927–1928).