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a long and unnecessary investigation of apollo the mouse lord

this is so different from what i usually post, and, i'm gonna be honest, zero note post right here, but. here is a glimpse of irl me i go to school for classics and art history so

i was so enraptured by this moniker that i had to research it, and have nowhere to put this other than tumblr, so i hope at least one person other than me finds it interesting. I actually love doing this kind of stuff so if anyone wants to hear about peacock symbolism in early christianity or the development of the written english alphabet OR if you happen to know a shitload about mouse lord apollo please add on or correct me if i have anything wrong! all resources i used will be linked in blue

prepare yourself as i convert to correct punctuation and capitalization for ease of understanding

As a proper art/classics student (and just between us, Apollo is one of my favorite gods), I was SO excited when I started reading the Iliad for my class on the Trojan War (Emily Wilson translation) and got to these lines, spoken by Chryses, Apollo's priest, when he's praying to Apollo to bring a plague to the Greeks stationed outside of Troy (Agamemnon got Chryseis, Chryses's daughter, as a war trophy, and refused to return her):

"Lord of the silver bow, now hear my prayer! Great Guardian of Tenedos and Chryse and Sandy Cilla! Mouse Lord! If I ever built temples to your liking, ever burned fat thighs of oxen or of goats for you, fulfill this prayer for me, and let the Greeks suffer your arrows to avenge my tears!" (Book 1, lines 36-42)

Now this stopped me in my tracks. WHAT was that!? I have NEVER heard of Apollo being called "Mouse Lord" before. What an interesting image, a splendiferous vision of a strapping young Apollo with a mouse army in his wake (Willard Stiles, anyone?). Why is Apollo the Mouse Lord, you may ask? Well, I had the same question, burning such a deep ardor in my heart and soul, that I just HAD to investigate.

This is not quite where I started, but I will begin my explanation with some etymology (another love of mine!!!) "Mouse" is a word inherited into the English language from Germanic (according to the Oxford English Dictionary––SUCH a good resource; crazy story behind it but, alas, one for another time), deriving from sources such as Old Frisian mūs (pronounced "moos"), Middle Dutch muus/mues/muys, Old High German mūs/muos (there's a few others, but let us continue forward)––while Germanic and Romance languages are two different things, they both stem from Indo-European, so sometimes there is overlap between the two (illustrated nicely in this image). All these Germanic words ultimately have the same base as the Classical Latin mūs and the ancient Greek μῦς (mūs).

Side note: mūs is also the root for muscle. This is because the Greeks decided that when you flex it looks like there are mice under your skin.

For those of you familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, the gods will often be given a specific title to denote which role of the aforementioned god is being portrayed (e.g. Jupiter Optimus Maximus ("best and greatest") may have different iconography than, say, Jupiter Tonans ("thundering"). Interestingly, this trend can also be seen with images of Christ, such as Christ the Good Shepherd versus Christ Pantocrator ("ruler of the universe"). Apollo as Mouse Lord is known by the epithet "Apollo Smintheus," but where does this name come from? It seems the Greeks had another word for mouse: σμίνθος (smĭ́nthos) (the distinction between smĭ́nthos and mūs I will not claim to know; I study Latin, not Greek). Adding an -eus suffix (added to noun or adjective stems to form a masculine noun of a person concerned with a thing (i.e. Apollo associated with mice)), we get Smintheus Apollo.

OK. That's about it for the etymology. Take my hand, onward we march.

Let's do a little loop back to Chryses for a second. Because he prays to the "Mouse Lord," it's clear he's the priest at a temple of Apollo Smintheus. This temple was likely located in Sminthe/Smintheion/Smintheum, Chryse (the town from which Chryses and Chryseis would have been from), or Hamaxitus (all of these are in modern Turkey btw). It seems there is rumor of mice living inside this temple, although we will return to that in a bit. There are ruins of a similar temple, the Smintheum, in Gülpinar, Turkey, although these are much newer than the dates associated with the Trojan War or Homer, going back to the mid-second century BCE.

(It is to be noted that Homer is a very contested individual. The epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey are dated much later than the supposed dates of the Trojan War, and they started as oral poems. The Greeks borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians, and did not have a system of writing during the periods of the Trojan War or when the epics would likely have been composed. They were written down much later, and it's possible that Homer didn't even exist, or that he was multiple people. Along with this, the Trojan War is also contested. Obviously, it did not occur as it appears in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but there is archaeological evidence of some kind of war happening at some indeterminate point somewhere in Turkey.)

Not to mention, this temple has Latin inscriptions, which means this would have been built during the time of the Romans (images of the temple here). Here's an article about the inscriptions if the passion strikes you, I skimmed through it, but it's mostly just honorary stuff and your average temple engravings of built when and by whom. Interesting nonetheless. The cult statue, although no longer standing, was seemingly Apollo stepping on a mouse, as determined by the coins of Alexandria depicting the same image (Apparently sculpted by Scopas, which I have just learned, is also the name of a fish). I think there's also supposed to be a common image of Apollo holding the mouse in his hand––I've searched for these coins, although I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for, so here is a picture of what seems, to me, to be closest.

Now all this is fascinating, but we still haven't discussed why Apollo might be the Mouse Lord, so let's not beat around the bush any longer.

There are two leading theories I've found that might explain this:

Apollo is a mouse-killer

The mice are sacred

Let's start with the former, since I personally like this version less. Let us remember, though, this is mythology, so neither of these theories are more correct than the other, and I've found evidence for both.

Apollo is the god of many things. I usually refer to him as the god of music, but he's also a god of archery, the sun, prophesy (remember this one), poetry, etc. He's quite the multi-talented guy. BUT, among these, he is a god of healing and diseases. This is clear, given that he's the one who sends the plague to the Greeks after they disrespect Chryses.

The Greeks would have known mice to be vermin, and might have associated them with disease. I've been looking at this website, which gives a pretty good summary of what we've been talking about (if not a little bit concise), but it's also literally a forum of ancient coins that says mice can't carry plague (they can, here's the CDC page for it), so take it with a grain of salt. A couple of the sites linked above translate "Smintheus" as "Mouse-Killer," although, as I explained, it really just means "person associated with mice." Apollo being a god of health, it's not a far stretch to assume that he would protect against plague, and I'm of the mind that the Greeks would know mice could bring sickness, and might pray to Apollo to keep them away. This would also explain why the image on Alexandrian coins and the cult statue depict Apollo with a mouse under his foot; literally quelling the plague. (I'm gonna be so honest I just wanted to include the next poem, I could not, for the life of me, think of a good segue into it):

Be it for bread, ye mice, you come, elsewhere Then go (my hut houses but scanty fare) Where you shall gnaw fat cheese and dried figs find, Full satisfied when on these scraps you've dined. If on my books again your teeth you whet, Poor feast you'll have, and one you will regret. (Ariston)

If mice were simply just pests to the Greeks and not plague-bringers, I find it difficult to believe Apollo would have an entire role dedicated to being a mouse-killer. Then again, this brings up an interesting question: why are the mice singled out? Lots of other vermin carry diseases––why is Apollo a mouse-killer and not, like, a general exterminator? What if these mice are important to him instead? So important that he gets the title of Mouse Lord? What if these mice... are sacred? (I hope that transition made up for the last one lol)

Remember that point about the mice living in the temple I said I would come back to? Here we are. It's mentioned in this article from University of Chicago Press that Claudius Aelianus, a Roman author, claimed there were mice living in the temple of Apollo Smintheus; these mice would have likely been fed well, given that they were eating food meant for Apollo. Honestly, I think this fact in and of itself makes a strong argument for why the mice might be sacred. Along with this, mice were a prophetic symbol, because they were "inspired by the vapours arising from the earth." As I mentioned before, prophesy is also in important aspect of Apollo. The most well known oracle of Apollo is the Oracle of Delphi, through whom he was known to speak to mortals. That being said, it's likely the oracle was inhaling ethylene, a central-nervous stimulant, from faults in the ground. While the temple at Delphi and the Smintheum are in two different places, these tales seem eerily similar. I'm not saying that the temple mice where inhaling stimulants and experiencing prophetic visions, but I can see why mice in a temple of Apollo might be associated with prophecies.

I also want to mention that the foundational myth of Hamaxitus has to do with mice AND prophecies. This myth can be found on the wiki page for Hamaxitus, or here (pg. 17). This excerpt is taken from the wiki:

Hamaxitus was founded by a band of Teucrian (i.e. Trojan) Cretans who were told by an oracle to found a city wherever the 'earth-born' (γηγενεῖς) attacked them. When they reached the area of Hamaxitus, a great horde of field mice ate all the leather on their equipment, and so they settled on the spot, interpreting the 'earth-born' of the oracle to have been the mice.

This myth was apparently written by Callinus of Ephesus, a greek elegiac poet, but, unfortunately, after, I kid you not, HOURS, of searching, I cannot confirm this. I have looked everywhere for some scrap of his poetry that has to do with mice––I have scoured the internet and I have scoured my library. I have touched books that likely have not been touched in 30 years. I found a book talking about Greek poetry that was written in Latin. I strongly considered translating a book from German to try to figure this out. No, I tell myself, you have hit a dead end. You do not need to translate a book from either Latin OR German to find out this one little scrap of information for a project no one asked you to complete and one which you are not getting a grade for. Alas, I digress. If you would like to read excerpts from the only two Callinus poems in apparently my entire library or the internet, here you go. They are not about mice.

I'm sorry to say, but that's about it. Apollo Smintheus is the Mouse Lord because he either protects against plague by killing mice, or mice are sacred to him because they're prophetic, and were a part of the foundational myth for one of his temples. I don't even like rodents that much, but I LOVE the idea of Apollo having a bunch of little mice that he carries around with him. I was mostly hitting research dead ends by the end of that, but honestly, I'm satisfied with what I've found. I don't really know what the point of all this was, but I was a woman possessed, and know more than I did two days ago so... I'd call that a success, I suppose.

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