Apollo

In Greek and Roman mythology, Apollo (Ancient Greek Ἀπόλλων, Apóllōn; or Ἀπέλλων, Apellōn), the ideal of the kouros (a beardless youth), was the archer-god of medicine and healing, light, truth, archery and also a bringer of death-dealing plague.

As the patron of Delphi ("Pythian Apollo"), Apollo was an oracular god. He was the prophetic deity of the Delphic Oracle, as well as one of the most important and many-sided of the Olympian deities. Apollo also had dominion over colonists, over medicine (mediated through his son Asclepius), and was the patron defender of herds and flocks. As the leader of the Muses (Apollon Musagetes) and director of their choir, he is a god of music and poetry. Hymns sung to Apollo were called paeans.

Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto, and the twin brother of the chaste huntress Artemis, who took the place of Selene in some myths as goddess of the moon.

In Hellenistic times, especially during the third century BCE, as Apollo Helios he became identified among Greeks with Helios, god of the sun, and his sister similarly equated with Selene, goddess of the moon. In Latin texts, however, Joseph Fontenrose declared himself unable to find any conflation of Apollo with Sol among the Augustan poets of the first century, not even in the conjurations of Aeneas and Latinus in Aeneid XII (161-215). Apollo and Helios/Sol remained separate beings in literary and mythological texts until the third century CE.