Apollo: Twin brother of Artemis, the virgin huntress, and son of Zeus and Leto, a Titaness. Called by the Greeks Phoebus ‘shining’. Cultic associations with Asia Minor predate those of Greece: Leto was said to have given birth to Apollo and Artemis in Lycia, though the place most closely associated with Apollo's birth was the sacred island of Delos. At birth he said: ‘Dear to me shall be the lyre and bow, and in oracles I shall reveal to men the inexorable will of Zeus.’

 

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It appears that both Greek and Etruscan Apollos came to the Aegean during the Archaic Period (from 1100 BC till 800 BC) from Anatolia. Homer pictures him on the side of the Trojans, not the Achaeans, in the Trojan War and he has close affiliations with Luwian Apaliuna, who in turn seems to have traveled west from further east. Late Bronze Age (from 1700 BC - 1200 BC) Hittite and Hurrian "Aplu", like Homeric Apollo, was a God of the Plague, and resembles the mouse god Apollo Smintheus. Here we have an apotropaic situation, where a god originally bringing the plague was invoked to end illness, merging over time through fusion with the Mycenaean "doctor" god Paieon (PA-JA-WO in Linear B); Paean, in Homer, was the Greek physician of the gods. In other writers the word is a mere epithet of Apollo in his capacity as a god of healing, but it is now known from Linear B that Paean was originally a separate deity.

 

Homer left the question unanswered,so that the whilst Hesiod separated the two, and in later poetry Paean was invoked independently as a god of healing. It is equally difficult to separate Paean or Paeon in the sense of "healer" from Paean in the sense of "song." It was believed to refer to the ancient association between the healing craft and the singing of spells, but here we see a shift from the concerns to the original sense of "healer" gradually giving way to that of "hymn," from the phrase Ιή Παιάν.

Such songs were originally addressed to Apollo, and afterwards to other gods, Dionysus, Helios, Asclepius, gods associated with Apollo. About the fourth century BC the paean became merely a formula of adulation; its object was either to implore protection against disease and misfortune, or to offer thanks after such protection had been rendered. It was in this way that Apollo became recognised as the God of Music. Apollo's role as the slayer of the Python led to his association with battle and victory; hence it became the Roman custom for a paean to be sung by an army on the march and before entering into battle, when a fleet left the harbour, and also after a victory had been won.

Hurrian Aplu itself seems to be derived from the Babylonian "Aplu" meaning a "son of" — a title that was given to the Babylonian plague god, Nergal (son of Enlil). Apollo's links with oracles again seem to be associated with wishing to know the outcome of an illness.

Apollo killed the Python of Delphi and took over that oracle, so he is vanquisher of unconscious terrors. He is golden-haired like the sun; he is an archer who shoots arrows of insight and/or death; he is a god of music and the lyre. Healing belongs to his realm: he was the father of Asclepius, the god of medicine. The Muses are part of his retinue, so that music, history, dreams, poetry, dance, all belong to him. The Muses are those we call on when we evoke creative imagination to give us helpful images.

 

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Apollo.html