On Apollo, Mithra, and the Silence of Delphi: A Reply

A few years ago, a group of my students visited me at the Guttenheim Gallery on Granville Island, Vancouver. One of them later published a summary of our conversation in a Vancouver newspaper. In that conversation I discussed the mythological resonances in my paintings, and I mentioned that scholars such as Fritz Graf have long noted that the origins of Apollo remain genuinely obscure — that certain elements of his cult may reach back to Eastern or Indo-European roots rather than to a purely Hellenic invention.

Calvert Watkins, in How to Kill a Dragon (1995), pursued a related thread through comparative Indo-European poetics, arguing that aspects of Apollo — his role as archer, as purifier, as a god who must himself be cleansed of blood-guilt — preserve very old Indo-European motifs, ones shared in modified form with Indo-Iranian tradition. And Roger Beck, one of the foremost modern authorities on Roman Mithraism, has shown in detail how Greco-Roman thinkers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods increasingly folded Mithra into their own solar theology, identifying him with Apollo and Helios.

None of this required the Greeks to have invented the equation themselves. It was, in fact, a habit of Greek thought long before Rome: interpretatio graeca, the practice of recognizing foreign gods by mapping them onto familiar Greek ones. Hellenistic rulers went further and made the equation official policy. At the great sanctuary of Mount Nemrut, King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene had his own dynastic theology carved in stone, invoking a single fused deity: Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes. Whatever else this inscription tells us, it demonstrates that educated people in antiquity — not modern enthusiasts — saw enough common ground between the Iranian sun-and-covenant god and the Greek Apollo to merge them formally, in a royal cult, in public.

The Puzzle of Delphi

I suggested that this same climate of religious accommodation might help explain a genuine historical puzzle: why Delphi survived the Persian invasion of 480–479 BCE essentially untouched. This is not a fringe question. Historians including J. A. R. Munro, Pierre Roussel, and Eduard Meyer, working within the broader debate over "Delphic medism" and Persian religious pragmatism, have pointed out how strange the sanctuary's survival really is.

Consider the position Delphi was in. After Thermopylae, Xerxes controlled nearly the whole of central Greece. Persian forces burned Athens and razed sanctuaries elsewhere without hesitation. Delphi, by contrast:

• held enormous wealth — vast dedications in gold and silver, accumulated over centuries;
• was militarily undefended;
• lay well within territory the Persian army effectively controlled.

And yet it emerged from the invasion unplundered. Herodotus offers a pious explanation involving divine intervention and thunderbolts (8.35–39), the kind of story Delphi itself had every incentive to circulate afterward. But for historians looking past the miracle narrative, the coincidence of Delphi's ambiguous wartime diplomacy, its known history of pragmatic accommodation with powerful neighbors, and its convenient survival has always looked less like providence and more like negotiation. If Xerxes' court entertained the kind of syncretic religious thinking that later Hellenistic rulers made explicit at Nemrut, restraint toward a shrine of "Apollo" — understood as, in some sense, akin to a god the Persians already honored — becomes far more explicable than restraint toward a shrine of a purely alien god would have been.

The Shahrvand Interview, and Roshanzamir's Objection

Recently a friend showed me a post on Bahram Roshanzamir's blog, Iran Studies, where he introduces himself as holding a "Master of Arts in Ancient Iranian History" and as the winner of a "Best Cultural Heritage Personality" award in 2013. He commented on that old student article without first writing to me directly.

The relevant passage from the original Shahrvand interview reads, in the reporter's paraphrase:

گیتی‌نوین در گفتگویی با سه تن از شاگردان خود در هفته‌نامه شهروند، در پاسخ به این پرسش که از چه رو به میتولوژی یونان اشاره می‌کنید و نه به میتولوژی ایران باستان؟ می‌گوید در واقع همه این داستان‌ها و افسانه‌های هندواروپایی یکی است، مثلاً آپولو، خدای آفتاب، همان میتراست، مثلاً در تاریخ هرودوت می‌خوانیم که خشایارشاه در برابر معبد آپولو نیایش کرد و حتماً این میترا بوده که مورد نیایش قرار گرفته...

In English: in a conversation with three of her students published in the weekly Shahrvand, Guity Novin was asked why she draws on Greek rather than ancient Iranian mythology. She replied, in the reporter's summary, that these Indo-European stories and legends share a common origin — that Apollo, the sun god, corresponds to Mithra, and that in Herodotus we read of Xerxes praying before a temple of Apollo, very likely intending Mithra by it.

It's understandable that the young reporter, writing quickly for a general audience, was imprecise: he rendered "these myths share a common root" as "these myths are the same." With a little charity, most readers would catch the intended meaning. Roshanzamir, however, did not extend that charity. He wrote:

برای اهالی تاریخ یک ضرب‌المثل است که هیچ دانشی مانند تاریخ از آماتورها و غیرمتخصص‌ها آسیب ندیده. نمونه‌اش سرکار خانم گیتی‌نوین، نقاش و گرافیست ایرانی، در پاسخ به اینکه چرا اسطوره‌های یونانی را به ایرانی ترجیح داده، برای توجیه خود (که نیازی هم به توجیه نبود واقعاً) با فهمی ناقص و سراسر اشتباه از تاریخ، به تاریخ آسیب می‌زند تا کار خود را توجیه کند.

In English: among historians, it is practically a proverb that no field has suffered more from amateurs and non-specialists than history. He offers me as an example — an Iranian painter and graphic artist who, asked why she prefers Greek myths to Iranian ones, damages the historical record with an incomplete and thoroughly mistaken understanding, all to justify a choice that never needed justifying in the first place.

He then criticizes me for supposedly claiming that these myths are simply identical rather than cognate, and goes on:

ما هیچ خبری از «خودآگاهی هندواروپایی» نداریم... میترا هم اصلاً خدای خورشید آریایی نبوده! میترا هرگز در اندیشه هندوایرانی خدای خورشید نبود. در اوستا، یشت میترا یا مهریشت از خورشیدیشت مجزاست... ولی در ایران احتمالاً از اواخر دوره هخامنشی میان میترا و شمش... پیوند برقرار شد... صد تا خدای خورشید داریم.

In English: he insists there is no such thing as an "Indo-European self-consciousness" — that ancient Iranians felt far closer kinship with Elamites, Babylonians, and Assyrians than with Greeks or Romans; that the whole notion of European "Aryan-ness" was a nineteenth-century French and English invention, later weaponized by German racial theory in the twentieth, and is scientifically obsolete — though, he adds, Iranian identity is Aryan, just unrelated to that European construct. He further argues that Mithra was never an Indo-Iranian sun-god at all: in the Avesta, the Mihr Yasht is textually distinct from the Khwarshed Yasht, and the two remain separate even in the later Khordeh Avesta. Only from the late Achaemenid period, he says, did an association with the Mesopotamian sun-god Shamash — who was certainly not Aryan or Indo-European — begin to form, an association that Hellenistic-era syncretism in northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia then generalized into shared cults. There are, he notes dryly, a hundred sun-gods in the ancient world; the fact that Commagene once equated Mithra with Apollo tells us nothing about the Greek pantheon and the Iranian pantheon as wholes.

A Reply

Mr. Roshanzamir's criticism ultimately rests on a series of category errors.

First, he refutes a proposition that was never made. I never argued that Apollo and Mithra were originally identical deities, nor that Greek and Iranian mythology are simply interchangeable systems. The original interview, as even the Persian text indicates, concerned common Indo-European roots and later religious correspondences, not literal identity.

Second, he treats philological distinctions within the Avesta as though they invalidate all later historical developments. But historians of religion do not proceed in this manner. The fact that Mithra and Hvar-khshaeta appear separately in Avestan texts does not erase the overwhelming evidence that by the Hellenistic and Roman periods Mithra had acquired pronounced solar characteristics and was explicitly identified with Helios and Apollo. The inscriptions of Commagene are not modern fantasies; they are ancient evidence.

Third, Mr. Roshanzamir dismisses comparative Indo-European scholarship without engaging it. The works of Georges Dumézil, Calvert Watkins, Martin West, Walter Burkert, Fritz Graf, and numerous others have demonstrated that Greek religion cannot be understood in isolation from its broader Indo-European and Near Eastern contexts. One may disagree with particular interpretations, but to imply that such comparisons are merely the product of amateur historical misunderstanding is difficult to sustain.

Most importantly, his criticism entirely bypasses the historical puzzle under discussion: why Delphi, uniquely wealthy, undefended, and fully exposed to Persian power after Thermopylae, survived virtually untouched.

This anomaly has long attracted scholarly attention. The debate over Delphic medism is hardly a fringe enterprise. Eduard Meyer, Pierre Roussel, J.A.R. Munro, and others have all recognized that Herodotus' miraculous explanation may conceal a more complicated political reality. Negotiation, accommodation, and Persian religious pragmatism remain legitimate historical possibilities.

To raise the possibility that Persian rulers may have perceived certain Greek cults through the lens of interpretatio or functional equivalence is therefore neither irrational nor historically irresponsible. The Achaemenids consistently demonstrated remarkable flexibility toward local religions throughout their empire. Cyrus in Babylon, Darius in Egypt, and later Hellenistic rulers all illustrate the same broader pattern of imperial religious accommodation.

The issue, therefore, is not whether Apollo "really was" Mithra. That would indeed be a simplistic and untenable proposition.

The real question is whether ancient peoples themselves sometimes perceived similarities between these deities, and whether such perceptions could have had historical consequences.

The evidence strongly suggests that they did.

Consequently, Mr. Roshanzamir's charge that this discussion constitutes "damage to history" seems considerably overstated. At most, one may debate the degree of Apollo-Mithra correspondence or the plausibility of its relevance to Delphi. But to dismiss the entire inquiry as amateurism, while ignoring the extensive comparative scholarship and the genuine historical anomaly involved, risks replacing historical analysis with polemics.

A compressed newspaper paraphrase, written years ago for a general audience, is a slender reed upon which to construct accusations of incompetence.

Indeed, intellectual charity would suggest another conclusion: that the interview raised a legitimate comparative question—one that scholars have debated for generations—even if the language of a journalist's summary lacked technical precision.