The most prominent and pointed characteristic of Apollo is one shared with his sister Diana. It is the mysterious relation which these two deities hold in common to death.
The Messianic tradition, first divided between Apollo and the great Minerva, is now subdivided between him and his sister Diana, who forms a kind of supplement to his divinity. The bow and arrows, the symbol which they bear in common, marks the original union in character, out of which their twin peculiarities had grown.
Apollo, indeed, as we see in the first Book of the Iliad, could himself become, like his sister, the immediate agent in the destruction of animals: but his principal function is with men. Hence the terrible slaughter of the Plague: hence his extraordinary and otherwise unsatisfactory participation in the death of Patroclus: hence, above all, though he is not the patron of Ulysses, and has no special connection with him, yet the slaughter of the Suitors in the Odyssey is appointed to take place on his festival, and therefore, as well as because it is effected by the Bow, under his auspices. But again; his office is not of a single aspect: he is a saviour from death, as well as a destroyer. Hence it is he, and not Venus, who saves Æneas[175]: it is he who carries Hector out of danger[176]. Yet a third, and very peculiar form of his office do we discover, common to him and to his sister. She is upon occasion strong enough to exercise the office of destruction properly so called[177], for sometimes she slays in wrath. But more usually, as he does for men, so she more especially exercises for women the mysterious function of administering painless and gentle death.
This singular and solemn relation of Apollo and Diana to death appears to have an entirely exclusive character attaching to it. There is a clear distinction between death inflicted by the symbolical arrows of these twin deities, which are the symbols of an invisible Power, and death resulting from physical or any other palpable causes, whether it be violent, or what we term natural. I do not now speak of the agency of Apollo the destroyer in (what we call) the Plague, nor of his slaying Eurytus on account of a personal insult (Od. viii. 227), but of the much more distinctive and prominent office assigned to him and to Diana, that of (so to speak) taking the sting from Death. Death by disease, Death by a broken heart[178], Death by shipwreck, or by the lightning of heaven[179], or by the fury of Scamander, whirling warriors to the sea, and burying them in the sand and shingle[180], are matters altogether distinct from this. Death through second causes, even man can bring about: Death without second causes is palpably Divine; and this it is that is assigned to Apollo and Diana only among the Homeric gods. There is no instance, if I remember rightly, in which any other among them brings about the death of a mortal, otherwise than by means of second causes. And there is one curious passage, from which it would appear that some other deities had to apply to them in order to set in motion this Divine prerogative. For when Theseus was carrying Ariadne to Athens, she did not reach her journey’s end:
πάρος δέ μιν Ἄρτεμις ἔκτα
Δίῃ ἐν ἀμφιρύτῃ, Διονύσου μαρτυρίῃσιν[181].
A period was put to her life in the island of Dia, by the goddess Artemis, at the instance of Dionysus. As if the tradition bore, that Dionysus or Bacchus, desiring her death, and having at his command no natural agency of mortal effect, was obliged to apply to Artemis or Diana to bring about this purpose.
The great enemy and scourge of mankind, under the treatment of the twin deities, is stripped of his terrors; and the very verse of Homer, ever responsive to his thought, changes to an easy and flowing movement as he describes this mode of passage from the world[182]:
τὴν δ’ Ἄρτεμις ἰοχέαιρα
οἷς ἀγανοῖς βελέεσσιν ἐποιχομένη κατέπεφνεν.