Leto (Roman Latona; Etruscan Letun)

Region/Culture: Southern Europe (Ancient Greece)
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Titaness and goddess of motherhood
Mythical Attributes: A gentle Titaness of the elder generation, she is the mother of the twin gods Apollo and Artemis and a protector called upon at the raising of children.
Role in Mythos: Leto is the goddess of motherhood and of the young, remembered above all for enduring Hera’s persecution across the whole earth until the floating island of Delos let her bear her divine twins.
Relation to Humans: She was honored as a guardian of children and mothers, worshipped chiefly beside her son and daughter rather than on her own account. Those who insulted or wronged her learned that her mildness ended where her children’s bows began.

The island would not hold still. It drifted through the Aegean like a raft cut loose, rootless and grey, neither fixed to the seabed nor counted among the proper lands, and for that reason alone it was the one place in the world willing to take her. Every other shore had been warned. A woman came down to the water heavy with child and close to her time, salt wind pulling at her clothes, and the wandering rock agreed to let her stop.

Her name was Leto, and she belonged to the older order of gods. Her parents were the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, her sister the star-goddess Asteria, and she came from the generation that ruled before Zeus and his brothers pulled the sky down on their elders. When the Olympians took the world, Leto was folded into it gently rather than cast into Tartarus with the rest of the Titans. Zeus took notice of her. The stories are quiet about how it began, saying only that she conceived twins by him, and that this was the beginning of all her trouble.

Hera, the wife of Zeus, did not forgive. She swore that no land under the sun would give Leto shelter to bear her children, and the earth obeyed, every country turning her away for fear of the queen of heaven. Some tellings send a serpent after her as well, the great Python of Delphi, driving the pregnant goddess from region to region so she could never rest. She walked and walked. Mainland and island shut their gates against her. The one thing that could not refuse her was a thing that was not quite land at all.

That was Delos, a barren floating island still called by its old name Asteria, which happened also to be the name of Leto’s own sister. In the older story Asteria had thrown herself into the sea as a quail to escape the attentions of Zeus and become this drifting rock, so that in the end it was family, transformed and half forgotten, that took Leto in. The island was poor and stony and afraid of what it was agreeing to, and Leto made it a promise: her son would raise his temple here, and pilgrims would come from everywhere, and the worthless rock would grow rich on their offerings. On that bargain Delos let her land, and four pillars are said to have risen from the seabed to hold it still at last.

The labor lasted nine days and nine nights. Every goddess came to sit with her, all but one. Eileithyia, who governs the pains of childbirth, had been kept back on Olympus by Hera and knew nothing of what was happening below, and nothing could be born until she came. At last Iris was sent running with a necklace of gold and amber to coax her down, and when she stepped onto Delos the birth broke free. Leto knelt and gripped the trunk of a slender palm tree, and Artemis was born first; then, some say, the newborn daughter turned at once and helped her mother deliver her brother. Apollo came into the light, the island flushed gold, and swans circled it seven times.

Leto herself is drawn as a matron rather than a maiden, veiled and modestly robed, often shown lifting the edge of her veil the way a bride or a grave woman does. The Greeks gave her the name of the gentle one, the demure goddess, soft-spoken and slow to anger. There is no monster in her, no weapon at her side, nothing frightening in the way she is pictured. What she carries instead is her children, and that turns out to be the most dangerous thing about her.

The proof came quickly and more than once. When the giant Tityos, set on by Hera, tried to force himself on Leto as she traveled near Delphi, she did not fight him. She called out, and her son and daughter answered from a distance with their bows, and the giant went down full of arrows. Beneath the earth he was staked out across nine acres while two vultures tore endlessly at his liver, which grew back with the moon so the feeding would never stop.

Worse waited for Niobe, the queen of Thebes, who had fourteen children and stood before the women of the city and asked why they wasted incense on a goddess with only two. Leto heard. Apollo and Artemis came with their arrows, and by the day’s end Niobe’s seven sons and seven daughters lay dead, and the queen wept until the gods turned her to stone, a weathered rock on a mountainside that still seemed to run with water. The peasants of Lycia fared no better. They had blocked a thirsty Leto from a pond and churned the mud to spite her, and she left them croaking in it forever as frogs.

Her power was never her own hand. Leto is a goddess of motherhood and of the young, invoked at the raising of children, and her strength runs entirely through the two archers she brought into the world. She endured what would have broken almost anyone. Homeless, hunted across the whole earth by a rival she could not answer, refused by every kingdom out of plain fear, she simply kept walking until she found the one place too rootless to turn her away. She won almost none of her own fights. But she raised the two who did, and after Delos her name was spoken beside theirs in the sanctuaries, on the island of her son’s birth and in the Lycian valley where a temple called the Letoon honored the mother together with her twins.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Leto in Greek mythology?

Leto is a Titaness of Greek mythology, the daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe and the goddess of motherhood. She is best known as the mother of the twin Olympian gods Apollo and Artemis, whom she bore to Zeus. Her Roman name is Latona.

Who were Leto’s children?

Leto’s children were the twin gods Apollo and Artemis, both fathered by Zeus. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, was born first, and Apollo, god of light, music, and prophecy, was born second on the island of Delos. Leto was worshipped primarily alongside these two children rather than on her own.

Why did Hera persecute Leto?

Hera persecuted Leto out of jealousy because Leto was pregnant with the twin children of Hera’s husband, Zeus. Hera decreed that no land on earth would give Leto a place to give birth, forcing the pregnant goddess to wander from country to country. In some versions Hera also sent the serpent Python to hunt Leto as she traveled.

Where did Leto give birth to Apollo and Artemis?

Leto gave birth on Delos, a barren floating island that was not fixed to the seabed and so was not bound by Hera’s command that no land shelter her. In return for refuge, Leto promised the poor island that it would become the wealthy sanctuary of her son Apollo. After the birth the island was said to be anchored in place by four pillars.

How did Leto punish those who wronged her?

Leto rarely acted with her own hand and instead relied on her children’s arrows. When Queen Niobe of Thebes boasted of having more children than Leto, Apollo and Artemis killed all fourteen of Niobe’s children. Leto also turned a group of Lycian peasants into frogs for refusing her water, and her attacker, the giant Tityos, was slain and condemned to eternal torment in the underworld.