fluence of his warm and gentle rays he disperses the noxious vapours of
the night, assists the grain to ripen and the flowers to bloom.

But although, as god of the sun, he is a life-giving and life-preserving
power, who, by his genial influence, dispels the cold of winter, he is, at
the same time, the god who, by means of his fiercely darting rays, could
spread disease and send sudden death to men and animals; and it is to this
phase of his character that we must look for the explanation of his being
considered, in conjunction with his twin-sister, Artemis (as moon-goddess),
a divinity of death. The brother and sister share this function between
them, he taking man and she woman as her aim, and those especially who died
in the bloom of youth, or at an advanced age, were believed to have been
killed by their gentle arrows. But Apollo did not always send an easy
death. We see in the _Iliad_ how, when angry with the Greeks, the "god of
the silver bow" strode down from Olympus, with his quiver full of
death-bringing darts, and sent a raging pestilence into their camp. For
nine days he let fly his fatal arrows, first on animals and then on men,
till the air became darkened with the smoke from the funeral pyres.

In his character as god of light, Phoebus-Apollo is the protecting deity of
shepherds, because it is he who warms {71} the fields and meadows, and
gives rich pastures to the flocks, thereby gladdening the heart of the
herdsman.

As the temperate heat of the sun exercises so invigorating an effect on man
and animals, and promotes the growth of those medicinal herbs and vegetable
productions necessary for the cure of diseases, Phoebus-Apollo was supposed
to possess the power of restoring life and health; hence he was regarded as
the god of healing; but this feature in his character we shall find more
particularly developed in his son Asclepius (AEsculapius), the veritable god
of the healing art.

Pursuing our analysis of the various phases in the character of
Phoebus-Apollo, we find that with the first beams of his genial light, all
nature awakens to renewed life, and the woods re-echo with the jubilant
sound of the untaught lays, warbled by thousands of feathered choristers.
Hence, by a natural inference, he is the god of music, and as, according to
the belief of the ancients, the inspirations of genius were inseparably
connected with the glorious light of heaven, he is also the god of poetry,
and acts as the speci