Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2015
Our level of tolerance of solar and lunar symbolism is now much lower than it was when devotees went questing in the fields of mythology in the nineteenth century. Should a scholar now appear automatically to equate an epiphany of Apollo with the rising of the sun, he will find it hard to carry conviction, and rightly so. At the other pole is the thesis of J.E. Fontenrose, recently accorded the accolade by G. Karl Galinsky as neither to be ‘ignored nor disputed’. He argues that, while Diana was clearly identified with the moon in Roman literature of the first century B.C. because of her association with Hecate in the triformis dea, Apollo was never equated with the sun until the Imperial period.