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70 early Ionian Greeks, Apollo was a stranger. Homer does not profess to understand his nature, or betray any insight into it. One sees occasionally the mythical origin of Homer's Jupiter. He is generally an autocratic principle, founding his action on natural, self-derived superiority: his will is law, because it has present ascendancy, and is an entity not to be disputed. On the other hand, he is sometimes obviously the ether, and Juno the atmosphere, as in the beautiful episode near the end of Book xiv. where the flowers of earth spring into being on their embrace. Homer's Mars, too, is the blind, uncultured instinct of violence; what the phrenologists call destructiveness. He makes him the war-god of the Trojans, whose instinctive courage he could not deny; reserving Minerva, the art and science of war, as the war-god of the Greeks. There is not a god or goddess, except Apollo, that Homer does not show he understood, and who is not therefore a plaything in his hands. But Apollo comes on the stage, "like night:" he is terrible; he deals mysterious death. Whatever success or movement of the Trojans Homer cannot account for on any natural principle or human instinct, Apollo brings about arbitrarily; and this prevails throughout the "Iliad." Homer was not a Dorian to worship Apollo intelligently; but he was an Ionian, and his candid, open nature did not refuse to see the magnificence and power which was manifested in his name, or to do a certain homage to his divinity which he pays to no other.

Apollo is sometimes confounded with Helius by later Grecian poets; and Homer, in making him the author of the Pestilence, may have had a suggestion of the kind. But nothing is proved more clearly by K. O. Müller, than that the Apollo of the Dorians was not the sun, although the sun's rays are an apt symbol of the genius that radiates beauty everywhere.

Homer's mode of treating Apollo is a testimony to the power of the Dorians of his day. His mode of representing the Cretans and Lycians is another proof of their acknowledged superiority in cultivation; for it was the Dorian colonies that civilized Crete and Lycia. Sarpedon, the