Far-Shooter. Foreseer. Wolf. Raven. Rat. Swan. Bringer of Health and Plague. Master of Song and Poetry. Lord of Truth and Enlightenment. Olympian God of prophecy and healing, archery and light and music, Apollo was honored throughout the ancient Mediterranean and across the Roman Empire. A paradoxical God, he is associated with both wisdom and virility, with compassion and cruelty, with fatherhood and youth. Twin to the virginal Artemis, he took many mortal lovers, male and female, and sired numerous children - at least one of whom, the healer Asklepios, ascended to godhood himself. Despite the deliberate destruction of His temples, Apollo was never forgotten. Renaissance artists and philosophers found in Him a worthy and willing patron, and in the centuries since his devotees have only grown in number. Among them are the contributors to this anthology, whose poems, essays, artwork, rites, and short fiction celebrate the God in all his wondrous complexity. And so we sing, as they did in ancient days: hail to you, Son of Thunder and Lightning. Io Paean!

Octavio Paz presents his sustained reflections on the poetic phenomenon and on the place of poetry in history and in our personal lives.

In this interpretation of the Odyssey, Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings.

He is the Messenger of the Gods and the Keeper of the Flocks, the Luck-Bringer and the Trickster, the Protector of the Home and the Guardian of the Road and all who travel it. Hermes is a diverse God of many names, talents, and masks.In this anthology by his modern devotees, you will find art, poetry, hymns, rituals, and essays.Come, and meet the Immortal Guide.

Archery and the Human Condition in Lacan, the Greeks, and Nietzsche showcases archery as a metaphor for the fundamental tension at the heart of the human condition. Matthew Meyer develops a theory of subjectivity that incorporates elements from psychoanalysis, Greek literature, philosophy, and Zen archery, bringing together allusions to the bow and archery made by Sophocles, Homer, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Lacan, Nietzsche, and Awa Kenzo. The book weaves together a psychoanalytic account of infant development, the obstacles faced by Greek heroes, and virtue theory to explore the tension between the forces inside and outside of the human that subject the human beingit to conditions beyond its control. Meyer develops this side of the tension through Jacques Lacan’s theory of human drive, illustrating the three parts of drive theory through application to three works in Greek literature and philosophy. He The second part of the text describes the other side of this fundamental tension--the ability to control drive impulses—through Aristotle’s use of the archer as a metaphor in his virtue theory. The book illustrates the productive nature of this tension through an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about drives and sublimation, especially his contention that the “highest” types are like “the bow with the greatest tension.”