Out of all
of Zeus’s divine children, Apollo is the one trying the hardest to be like his
father. The birth of the world and what happened to his great grandfather and
grandfather would have been well-known to him. It’s a matter of record and
right that the son replace the father, and Apollo intends for that son to be
him, despite the prophecy that it would be a son of Metis and not Leto.
Apollo,
though, just doesn’t have the size for the job. He has ambitions, certainly,
and he is competitive, but his talents don’t take him far enough, nor does his
intellect. He is a boy attempting to be a man, but he has not matured enough.
His competitions are child games, and not political strategies. Whereas Zeus
was raised in the wild and his mother taught him how to get revenge on Cronos,
Apollo has only seen Zeus’s exploits from afar and is doing his best to emulate
them without a full understanding of what he is doing. Perhaps if he were to
pay attention, and were to grow and mature, he might make it one day.
This
maturity brings us back to Athena and Artemis. We’ve already seen how they have
their childish streaks, and now Apollo makes a third. It can’t be a coincidence
that all three exhibit this trait, and while we can’t say that all of the Greek gods exhibit this
childishness, we have enough to look for it is as a pattern in the others. If
more of them turn out to follow this pattern, it says something very
interesting, and disturbing, about the Greek gods.