αἲ γὰρ, Ζεῦ τε πάτερ, καὶ Ἀθηναίη, καὶ Ἄπολλον.
But the general capacity of Apollo, like Minerva, to receive prayer, is demonstrated by the language of Diomed to Hector in the Eleventh Book, when Apollo was not on the battlefield (363, 4); ‘for this time, Phœbus Apollo has delivered you: and doubtless you took care to pray to him, when you ventured within the clang of spears:’
νῦν αὖτέ σ’ ἐρύσσατο Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων,
ᾧ μέλλεις εὔχεσθαι, ἰὼν ἐς δοῦπον ἀκόντων.
5. We may now pass on to another head of special prerogatives.
Exempt from appetite and limitations.
Both Minerva and Apollo are generally exempt from the physical limitations, and from the dominion of appetite, to which the deities of invention are as generally subject. Though, when a certain necessity is predicated of the gods in general, they may be literally included within it, we do not find that the Poet had them in his eye apart from the rest, and the particular liabilities and imperfections are never imputed to either of them individually. What is said of them inclusively with others, is in reality not said of them at all, but only of the prevailing disposition of the body to which they belong: just as we are told in the Iliad (xi. 78), that all the gods were incensed with Jupiter because of his bias towards the Trojans, when we know that it was in reality only some among them, of the greatest weight and power. Neither Apollo nor Minerva eats, or drinks, or sleeps, or is wearied, or is wounded, or suffers pain, or is swayed by passion. Neither of them is ever outwitted or deluded by any deity of invention, as Venus is, and even as Jupiter is, by Juno in the Fourteenth Iliad. When Minerva, in the shape of Mentor, receives the cup in the Pylian festivities, she passes it on to Telemachus, but it is not stated that she drinks of it[128]. With this compare the meal of Mercury on the island of Calypso[129], the invitation to Iris to join in the banquet of the Winds, and her own fear lest she should lose her share of the Ethiopian hecatombs[130].
Their relations to animal sacrifice are different from those of the other, at least of the inventive, gods. Apollo, indeed, is charged by Juno with having attended at the marriage of Thetis together with the rest of the gods, where they all banqueted[131];
ἐν δὲ σὺ τοῖσιν
δαίνυ’ ἔχων φόρμιγγα·