Apollo
Roman · deity · early republic · deity
Apollo is the exception in Roman religion: every other great Greek god got a Latin name, and he did not. The Romans brought him in early — the cult was in the Campus Martius by the middle of the fifth century BCE — and they brought him in as a healer, Apollo Medicus, invoked against plague, before he became anything else. His temple there was rebuilt in the late Republic as the Temple of Apollo Sosianus, beside the Theatre of Marcellus. Augustus later made him a dynastic god with the temple on the Palatine. He is recorded as a Roman figure in his own right because the Roman cult has its own history, and linked to the Greek record rather than merged into it.
Domains
- healing
- prophecy
Epithets
- Medicus
Relations
- counterpart of: Apollo
Sources
- Reference treatment of the Temple of Apollo Sosianus and the antiquity of the Apollo cult in the Campus Martius.