The many facets of Apollo in Metapontum : between tradition and innovation, locally and internationally

Some decades before Herodotus visited Metapontum, most probably in the late 440s or early 430s BC, the inhabitants of the city came to believe that Aristeas of Proconnesus prodigiously appeared in their territory, bid them establish an altar of Apollo and set up a statue for him. The Metapontines sent to Delphi to ask Apollo what the apparition was and what they should make with it, the god bid them to 'obey', and they established a new cult for Apollo and Aristeas in the market place, where Herodotus saw the altar and the statues. Aristeas was an exceptional figure, associated with resurrection and teleportation, possessed by Apollo and able to accompany the god changed in a crow.

Apollo's and Aristeas' cult in Metapontum was an innovation for the city's religious life, traditionally dominated by the cult of Apollo Lykeios.

Apollo 'the wolf' had a prominent role in the sacred area beside the agora, where a major temple (temple 'B'), as well as rough stones (the so-called argoi lithoi), pillars and steles were dedicated to him. Apparently, such stones were used since the beginnings of the religious life on the spot, before temples were erected. A close reading of the evidence shows that Apollo Lykeios had a special relationship with polis life.The god was connected with the ephebes, the young males in their late teens ready to join the political and military community.The god of Metapontum, thus, was not very different from Apollo Delphinios and Apollo Karneios. He was similar especially to Apollo Lykeios of Argos, where both the cult and the myths concerning Danaos, the outsider who started a new kingship and founded the sanctuary of the Lykeios, placed renewal of power and communal life under the sign of the wolf. Similarly, Delphic myths centered on wolves focused on the very beginnings of human social life in primeval times. The cults of Metapontum, Argos, and also Sycion show that it was the transformation of the youg into citizens and soldiers to be symbolically tantamount to the periodical rebirth of the polis. The cult of Metapontum should be seen, then, as one of the aspects of Apollo's complex and multifaceted identity in Greece. We do not have before us a fragment of a parochial microhistory.

But what about the relationship between tradition and innovation? In other words, how the cult of Apollo and Aristea related to that of Apollon Lykeios? The prevailing approach to such a question is a socio-political one. The establishment of the new cult on the market-place is commonly understood as a way to undermine the old aristocratic cults, and reorient polis religion. Now, a closer look at the characteristic features of the new cult and the stories surrounding it clearly shows that innovation firmly anchored in the preexistent cultural context. On the one hand one finds in the Aristeas-Apollo complex religious representations and narrative structures which are similar to those integral to other stories common in Magna Graecia; on the other hand the new cult had strong Hyperborean, 'daphnephoric' and Delphic connotations, which are not absent in the cult of the Lykeios. Thus, the Hyperborean and Delphic dimensions integral to Aristeas' Apollo connected both to the Lykeios and to aspects of religious culture of Magna Graecia, Delphi and Delos.

New religious developments in Metapontum did not loose contact with traditional civic religion, and made use of cultural traits available both at regional and international level. Local, regional and international levels were intertwined, and the cults of Apollo in Metapontum are to be understood in the light of Mediterranean mobility.