Apollo

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.

Parentage

• father: IuppiterParentage in the cited Latin account.Hyginus, Fabulae, Preface: apollo (primary)
• mother: LatonaParentage in the cited Latin account.Hyginus, Fabulae, Preface: apollo (primary)

Children

• Aesculapius

Domains

• healing
• prophecy

Epithets

• MedicusReference treatment of Apollo Medicus, the earliest Roman form of the cult. (secondary)

Relations

• counterpart of: ApolloThe Greek god received into Roman cult under his own name. The registry keeps the Roman cult as its own record because it has its own temples, dedication dates and functions — Apollo Medicus the plague-healer, then Augustus's Apollo Palatinus.Reference treatment of the Roman reception of Apollo. (secondary)
• father: IuppiterParentage in the cited Latin account.Hyginus, Fabulae, Preface: apollo (primary)
• mother: LatonaParentage in the cited Latin account.Hyginus, Fabulae, Preface: apollo (primary)

Sources

• Apollo was received into Roman cult by the mid-5th century BCE in the Campus Martius, first as the healer Apollo Medicus, and is the one major Greek god the Romans adopted without giving him a Latin name.: Reference treatment of the Temple of Apollo Sosianus and the antiquity of the Apollo cult in the Campus Martius. (secondary)