Apollo and Daphne: The Myth Behind the Laurel Tree

Apollo and Daphne is the Greek myth that explains why the laurel is Apollo’s sacred tree. The nymph Daphne, whose name simply means “laurel” in Greek, is chased by Apollo after Eros, whom the Romans called Cupid, makes the god fall in love with her to punish his arrogance. Just as Apollo catches up, Daphne prays to her father, the river god Peneus, and is turned into a laurel tree. Apollo then adopts the laurel as his emblem, the leaf that crowns his hair, his lyre and the winners of the games at Delphi. The version everyone knows comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.452-567), where the episode is introduced as “Phoebus’s first love”.

The prologue: Apollo’s victory over Python

Ovid opens with a detail that sets up everything else. Apollo has just shot the serpent Python, the monster born from the mud left by Deucalion’s flood. To celebrate, he founds the Pythian Games. But at that time, Ovid notes, there was no laurel yet: young winners were crowned with oak leaves (1.448-451). The story that follows will give Delphi its crown.

Still proud of his kill, Apollo spots Cupid stringing his bow and mocks him. What is a boy doing with a warrior’s weapon? Let him stir up love affairs with his torch and leave archery to the god who has just brought down a monster (1.454-462).

Cupid’s two arrows

Cupid answers with action. He flies to the summit of Parnassus and draws two arrows with opposite powers. One, sharp and tipped with gold, kindles love; the other, blunt and tipped with lead, drives it away (1.466-471). He fires the golden arrow into Apollo’s heart and the lead one into Daphne’s.

That device is the key to the myth: neither Apollo nor Daphne chooses what they feel. The most clear-sighted god on Olympus, the one who reveals the future at Delphi, becomes the tool of a child’s revenge.

Daphne, daughter of Peneus

Daphne is a nymph of Thessaly, the daughter of the river Peneus. She roams the woods in plain clothes, her hair tied back with a ribbon, and turns away every suitor. Ovid calls her a rival of Diana, Apollo’s sister, known to the Greeks as Artemis. She begs her father to let her stay a virgin forever, “as Diana’s father granted her” (1.486-487). Peneus agrees but warns her that her beauty will work against her wish.

So the lead arrow does not create Daphne’s refusal. She was already a huntress in the mold of Artemis; the arrow simply turns her refusal into flight.

The chase

Apollo sees her and catches fire, Ovid says, like stubble in a field. He watches her hair fall loose over her neck and imagines it combed; he admires her fingers and arms and pictures the rest.

Daphne runs. Apollo runs after her, talking all the way. His speech (1.504-524) is one of the best-known passages in the poem. He begs her to slow down so she won’t scratch herself on the brambles, then lists his credentials. He is no shepherd or country lout: Delphi, Claros, Tenedos and Patara are his; Jupiter is his father; he reveals what was, is and will be; he invented music and medicine. Yet no herb can cure love, and the art that heals everyone cannot heal its own master.

The comedy darkens. Ovid compares the pursuit to a Gallic hound chasing a hare across open ground (1.533-539): one runs for a meal, the other for her life. Carried on the wings of love, Apollo gains on her until his breath stirs the hair on her neck.

The transformation into a laurel

Pale and exhausted, Daphne sees the waters of the Peneus and calls on her father: let him destroy, by changing it, the beauty that pleased too well (1.545-547). The prayer is barely finished when a heavy numbness grips her limbs. Thin bark closes around her breast, her hair becomes leaves, her arms branches; her feet, so fast a moment ago, sink into roots; a treetop takes the place of her face. Only her radiance remains (1.548-552).

Apollo still loves her. He lays his hand on the trunk and feels her heart beating beneath the new bark; he kisses the wood, and the wood shrinks from his kisses (1.553-556).

Why the laurel became Apollo’s tree

The god then speaks a kind of dedication. Since Daphne cannot be his bride, she will be his tree. Laurel will wreathe his hair, his lyre and his quiver; it will go with Roman generals in their triumphs up to the Capitol, and stand guard at the doors of Augustus’s house. And just as Apollo’s hair is forever young, the laurel will keep its leaves forever (1.557-565). The tree, Ovid says, seemed to nod its crown in agreement.

The ending is political too. Writing under Augustus, Ovid ties the laurel of Roman triumphs and of the emperor’s house to the oldest love of the god Augustus claimed as his patron.

How the ancient versions differ

Daphne’s story is known mostly from Hellenistic and Roman sources. It does not appear in Homer or Hesiod, and the surviving versions disagree on her family and on where it all happened.

• Ovid (Metamorphoses 1.438-567) sets it in Thessaly, by the river Peneus, and makes it a sequel to the killing of Python. Only Ovid centers the story on Cupid’s revenge and the two arrows.
• Parthenius of Nicaea (Love Stories 15), in the 1st century BC, summarizes a version he credits to earlier writers. Daphne is the daughter of Amyclas, king of Laconia, and hunts in the mountains of the Peloponnese. Leucippus, son of Oenomaus, falls for her and disguises himself as a girl to join her band. A jealous Apollo makes the huntresses want to bathe; the trick is exposed and Leucippus is killed. Pursued afterwards by the god, Daphne prays to Zeus to be taken from human sight and becomes a laurel.
• Pausanias (8.20.1-4), traveling in Arcadia, gives the Arcadian and Elean version: Daphne is the daughter of the river Ladon, and the Leucippus story belongs here too. He notes that the Syrians on the river Orontes tell their own version, which he chooses not to repeat.
• Hyginus (Fabulae 203) is brief: chased by Apollo, Daphne asks Earth for protection, and Earth takes her in and changes her into a laurel.

The variants move the myth to whichever place claimed the sacred laurel: Thessaly, Arcadia, Laconia and, in the Hellenistic period, the suburb of Daphne outside Antioch, famous for its laurel grove and its sanctuary of Apollo.

From Tempe to Delphi

The story is more than a just-so tale. At Delphi, laurel was everywhere, from the crowns of Pythian victors to the cult of Apollo itself. Aelian (Historical Miscellany 3.1) describes the procession sent from Delphi to Tempe, the valley of the Peneus in Thessaly, to cut the laurel for the Pythian crown, at the place where Apollo was said to have purified himself after killing Python. By making Peneus Daphne’s father, Ovid matches that sacred geography: the Pythian laurel comes from the nymph’s own river.

The myth also stages a tension built into Apollo. He is the god of order, measure and knowledge, and yet his love affairs fail more often than anyone’s. Daphne flees him, Cassandra rejects him, and other lovers die. Delphi’s victory crown carries the memory of a defeat.

Legacy in art and poetry

Few myths have drawn so many artists. Bernini’s marble group (1622-1625, Galleria Borghese, Rome) freezes the instant when Daphne’s fingers turn to leaves and her feet take root under Apollo’s hand. Piero del Pollaiolo, Tiepolo and Chassériau painted their own versions. Petrarch spent a lifetime punning on the name of his beloved Laura and the laurel (lauro), and the idea of a poet “laureate”, crowned with laurel, goes back to this story.

Daphne also belongs to a pattern. Several young women in Greek myth escape a god’s desire by changing their nature, like Asteria, who became an island. Daphne is the most famous of them, and the one who left Apollo his most visible emblem.

Further reading

For the god and his other unhappy loves, see the profile of Apollo; for the archer who starts the trouble, see Eros, and for love deities across cultures, the comparison of gods of love. The monster whose death opens the episode is covered in Python, and the sanctuary where the laurel became a crown in Delphi. The story just before it in the Metamorphoses is the flood of Deucalion and Pyrrha. For another myth in which Apollo and Artemis strike together, read the myth of Niobe, and for another Ovidian tale of impossible love, the myth of Narcissus.