Apollo Hylates

Also Known As: Greek Ἀπόλλων Ὑλάτης, “Apollo of the Woodland”, from ὕλη, hylē, “forest”, with an alternative derivation from ὑλακτέω, “to bark”; addressed in the older Cypro-Syllabic dedications only as to-te-o, “the god”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Cyprian Mythology, Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He holds a wooded precinct as inviolable ground, shelters what runs into it, protects children through weaning, heals, and keeps the wild and cultivated life of Cyprus turning over from season to season.
Role in Mythos: He is the indigenous male god of Cyprus, named for centuries only as “the god”, who was assimilated to Apollo in the fifth century BC and kept his own woodland name folded inside the Greek one.
Relation to Humans: Cypriots climbed to his sanctuary west of Kourion for some eight hundred years and left terracotta horsemen, wreathed portrait heads and small stone boys there to buy his protection over children, cattle and crops. He was also unsafe to be careless around, since Strabo records that anyone who laid a hand on his altar was flung from the headland into the sea.

The dogs stop at the line. They can see the deer twenty paces off, unhurried, close enough to run down in a few seconds, and they bay themselves hoarse in the white dust and will not cross. Inside the precinct the herd goes on cropping the grass beneath the trees as though nothing at all stood behind them. Aelian, writing in the third century AD, thought this the most remarkable thing about the place: the deer of Kourias knew exactly where the god’s ground began, and so did the hounds.

That ground lay about two and a half kilometres west of the city of Kourion, on the road running toward Paphos, and the god who held it was Apollo Hylates. The name is doing quiet work. *Hylē* is the Greek word for woodland, and on this site the woodland came first. Before there was a temple there was a stand of trees, and the presence people felt in it was the presence they came to bargain with. Some ancient readers heard a different root altogether, the verb for barking, which would make him a god announced by dogs rather than by leaves. The sources do not settle it.

What they do settle is stranger. For the whole of the Cypro-Archaic period and into the Cypro-Classical, the dedications carved at Kourion in the local syllabic script name no god at all. They say only *to-te-o*, “to the god”, and leave it there. The same wordless formula turns up at Golgoi and at Rantidi, so this was not one town’s private patron but a male deity known across the island, addressed the way you address someone whose name every person in the room already knows. He went unnamed for generations because nobody in Cyprus needed him named.

Apollo arrived late here, later than almost anywhere else in the Greek world. The earliest Cypriot dedication to him yet found is a fifth-century BC inscription cut into the plinth of a temple boy at Kourion, one of those squat stone toddlers with an offering in the crook of an arm that Cypriot parents left in their hundreds. From that point the older god and the newcomer are the same god. And the epithet that everyone now uses, Hylates, is later still: it first appears in dedications of the mid-third century BC, which means it was coined by Hellenistic worshippers reaching backwards for the thing their ancestors had actually worshipped, the sacred wood itself. The famous name of the Cypriot Apollo is the newest part of him.

It stuck hard. Lycophron could call the whole island the land of Hylates and expect to be understood. Tzetzes, combing the poem for explanations centuries afterwards, traced the title to a place called Hyle near Kourion. Stephanus of Byzantium lists Amamassos, Erystheia, Hyle and Tembros as towns that kept his cult. At Chytroi, around 300 BC, someone dedicated to plain Hylates without Apollo’s name attached at all, in one of the last uses of the old syllabary for such a purpose. The Greek god had the island, and the Cypriot god still had the tree line.

His sanctuary grew the way sanctuaries do, by accretion. A circular monument stood in the precinct, a ring built for processions or dancing around a grove of trees, which is the archaic heart of the place made architectural. There was a formal altar and an archaic precinct, a long street running south to north, gates named for Kourion and for Paphos, and eventually a temple raised in the late Classical or early Hellenistic period directly on the ruins of the older one. In the first century AD it was rebuilt again with heavy blocked-out capitals of a Nabataean type, and the Romans added buildings north and south for votives or for visitors, with a palaestra and baths pressed against the outside of the east wall. When the accumulated terracottas grew too numerous to house, priests buried them in a votive pit, five centuries of small clay hopes packed into the ground.

Those terracottas are the best portrait of what he was for. Horse-and-rider figurines start appearing from the seventh century BC and become the standard gift: some are warriors with shields, some are ordinary men bringing an amphora or a sacrificial animal, some are mostly horse, the animal enlarged to say something about the giver’s standing. Temple boys carry the other half of his work. They were left at the moment a child was weaned and pushed out into a dangerous independence, and they ask the god to keep it alive, which is why the same god is invoked elsewhere on Cyprus as healer and as averter of evil. Wreathed male heads round it out, crowned with laurel and other medicinal leaves, appealing to whatever in him made things grow back after the long dry summer.

He was not only gentle. Strabo describes the headland past Kourion as the place from which those who touched Apollo’s altar were thrown. Nobody records an appeal.

Away from Kourion he shows a colder face. At Nea Paphos he held a rock-cut sanctuary sunk into the ground in an old cemetery district, two inscriptions still fixed in place naming him its tutelary god, and a cult like that belongs to the underside of things, to oracles delivered out of the dark rather than to hunters’ luck. He was worshipped at Dhrymou as well, deep in the Paphian countryside.

His powers follow from the wood. Whatever crosses into his ground cannot be taken there, and the deer make that visible in a way no inscription could. He makes young things survive, cattle and crops and children in that order of frequency, and he answers from underground when asked properly. His limits follow from the same source. His authority stops at the boundary of the temenos, and a stag that steps outside it is meat; he is a god of one island and its groves, without a myth cycle of his own, without a birth story, without a single narrative that belongs to him rather than to the Greek Apollo he was folded into. When the syllabic script died and the sanctuary fell quiet in the fourth century AD, there was no literature to carry him. What is left of him is a ring of stones where trees used to be.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Apollo Hylates?

Apollo Hylates is the woodland god of ancient Cyprus, whose main sanctuary lay about two and a half kilometres west of the city of Kourion. He began as an indigenous Cypriot deity known only as “the god” and was assimilated to the Greek Apollo in the fifth century BC. The epithet Hylates comes from the Greek word for forest and refers to the sacred grove that formed the original precinct.

What does the name Hylates mean?

Hylates most likely derives from the Greek *hylē*, meaning forest or woodland, and marks the god as the power resident in the sacred grove at Kourion. An alternative derivation connects it to the verb meaning “to bark”. The name is Hellenistic rather than ancient: it first appears in dedications at Kourion in the middle of the third century BC, long after the cult itself began.

Where was Apollo Hylates worshipped?

His principal sanctuary was at Kourion in southern Cyprus, where worship on the site ran from roughly the eighth century BC to the fourth century AD. He also held a rock-cut underground sanctuary at Nea Paphos and was worshipped at Dhrymou and Chytroi. Stephanus of Byzantium names Amamassos, Erystheia, Hyle and Tembros as further towns that kept his cult.

Why were deer sacred at his sanctuary?

Aelian records that deer at Kourias would take refuge inside Apollo’s precinct, where hunting hounds would bay at them but not dare to follow. The deer grazed there unafraid, trusting the god’s protection. The story illustrates the sanctuary’s status as inviolable ground rather than any myth of the god transforming into or hunting deer.

What happened to people who touched his altar?

Strabo reports that anyone who touched the altar of Apollo near Kourion was thrown from the headland into the sea. The sanction marks the altar as untouchable rather than merely restricted. No ancient source records an exception being made.