#Please do not confuse him with Carneus who was Apollo's foster son and much beloved by him

[gingermintpepper]

Happy Thursday! Have a list of some of my favourite underrated Apollo factoids!

Father of the Lapiths (and by extension the Centaurs)! While Chiron wasn't Apollo's by birth, an alternate telling of the genesis of centaurs did place Apollo as their father when his lover Stilbe bore him twin sons - Lapithes and Centaurus. Much like the more popular version of the centaurs' genesis which has them as an analogue for wild and untempered desire, this version also features the centaurs causing chaos - both by choosing to mate with the wild mares of the mountainside which resulted in their half man-half horse appearance and by causing a terrible uproar during a wedding ceremony (which, of course, is an alternate telling of the centauromachy wherein Apollo himself comes to quell the wedding quarrel as opposed to Heracles) There's a whole great deal of psychomachia embedded in the opposing of the centaurs with humanity and I've always loved this version due to the way it highlights that centaurs do have the same capability for good that humans do as they have the parentage, but it's their choices that make them beastly - not the circumstances of their birth.

Eurytus, the original owner of the Apollonian bow Odysseus uses and the one Penelope sets apart for the suitors to string in her challenge, was Apollo's grandson. He was such a skilled archer that Apollo gave him one of his own bows and he was even believed to have taught Heracles archery. Unfortunately, he became rather prideful about the whole thing and declared himself an even better archer than Apollo and proceeded to challenge his grandfather to an archery contest wherein Apollo gave him the honour of shooting first and then promptly shot him dead with his own arrow for his insult. Apollo passed the bow on to his much sweeter great-grandson Iphitus who later gave the bow to his good friend Odysseus.

Despite boars usually being regarded as creatures of wild, raging temperament, there's a particular curiousity about the Erymanthian Boar not being called to be slain by Heracles but instead retrieved alive. According to a couple different versions, the Erymantian Boar was either the boar Artemis summoned to kill Adonis for Aphrodite having killed Hippolytus (and thusly, was named after Erymanthos, the marshy region sacred to the goddess where it wandered) or Apollo himself transformed into a boar to kill Adonis because Aphrodite blinded his son Erymanthus (which, accordingly, would be the reason for the boar's name) who saw the goddess bathing after she'd had sex with Adonis and tattled on her (this, naturally, would've occurred between Persephone and Aphrodite's 'cold war' for Adonis). Either way, the Erymanthian Boar was a sacred animal to the twins and provides a very interesting bit of depth to what is one of the more overlooked labours of Heracles. (There's even a bit about a particular temple of Apollo's claiming that they had the boar's tusks enshrined there)

According to Nonnus' Dionysica, after the whole Hyacinthus affair, Apollo had a bit of a phobia of the wind. In particular, there's a passage that describes "...when Zephyros breathed through the flowery garden, Apollon turned a quick eye upon his young darling, his yearning never satisfied; if he saw the plant beaten by the breezes, he remembered the quoit, and trembled for fear the wind..."

In the early days of the Bohemian Grove (that is, an exclusive American gentleman's club) one of the earliest productions put on at their annual meeting is an original work by early American author Will Irwin. His work, which was played at the 1904 meeting, was called the Hamadryads and features a Greek myth OC called Meladon who kidnapped the titular hamadryads (who were actual spirits in greek myth) and trapped them in trees. The play ends when Apollo descends and slays Meladon with an arrow, freeing the hamadryads. This isn't strictly related to classical greek myth but it is also, by far, one of the wildest things I've ever learned while researching modern theatric adaptations of greek dramas and tragedies because the Bohemian Grove is also the center of many conspiracy theories which involve concepts like the New World Order and other such secret society beliefs. Naturally, I had to share this information.