Apollo and Daphne: Two Arrows and a Crown of Leaves

There is probably a jar of dried bay leaves somewhere in your pantry. The plant is Laurus nobilis, the bay laurel, and according to Ovid every one of those leaves descends from a young woman who would rather become a tree than be caught by a god. The same leaves crowned victors at Delphi and generals at Rome, framed the front door of the emperor Augustus and survive today in the word ‘laureate’, handed to Nobel winners and national poets. The story of Apollo and Daphne is about how a refusal was turned into a trophy, and it begins with an archery quarrel.

A boast and two arrows

The version everyone knows comes from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, finished around 8 CE. Apollo has just killed the monstrous serpent Python, almost emptying his quiver to do it, and he is pleased with himself. Seeing Cupid bending a bow, he sneers: what is a playful boy doing with a man’s weapons? Leave the serious shooting to me.

Cupid – Ovid’s Latin name for the Greek Eros – replies that Apollo’s bow may hit everything, but his own will hit Apollo. He flies to the shady peak of Parnassus and draws two arrows of opposite effect. One is golden and sharp, and kindles love. The other is blunt, with lead under the shaft, and puts love to flight. The gold goes into Apollo. The lead goes into Daphne, daughter of the river god Peneus. Ovid announces the outcome with a flourish:

Phoebus’ first love was Daphne, Peneus’ daughter. No blind chance gave her to him, but the savage anger of Cupid.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

The neat pair of arrows belongs to Ovid’s telling, but the idea had Greek roots. Euripides had already imagined Eros stretching twin arrows of desire, one bringing a happy life and the other throwing a life into confusion. What Ovid adds is a joke about rank. The god of archery, patron of the Muses, the grandest young god on Olympus, is outshot by a child, and the rest of the episode is his humiliation.

The chase

Daphne wants nothing to do with marriage. She roams the woods in imitation of Diana, the Roman Artemis, her hair tied back anyhow, and she has already begged her father for lifelong virginity. Apollo sees that loose hair and wonders how it would look combed, and the pursuit begins.

Ovid makes the chase both thrilling and absurd. Apollo recites his credentials as he runs. He is no shepherd or yokel; Delphi, Claros, Tenedos and Patara serve him; Jupiter is his father; he reveals what will be, what was and what is; he invented medicine – though, he laments, no herb can cure love. He even offers to slow down if she will. Then Ovid drops the comedy and compares them to a hound from Gaul closing on a hare in an open field, jaws almost at its heels.

Modern readers have rightly noticed how the narrator lingers on Daphne’s body as she runs, the breeze baring her limbs and lifting her clothes. The poem does not excuse Apollo, but it does not look away either, and that discomfort is part of what keeps the episode alive in classrooms and galleries.

Bark, leaf, crown

Near her father’s river, exhausted, Daphne prays for the shape that pleased too well to be destroyed. A heavy numbness grips her limbs. Thin bark closes around her breast, her hair turns to leaves, her arms to branches, her quick feet to sluggish roots, and a treetop takes the place of her face. Only her gleam remains. Apollo still loves her. He lays his hand on the trunk and feels her heart trembling beneath the new bark, embraces the branches, kisses the wood, and the wood shrinks from his kisses.

Then he claims her anyway. Since you cannot be my wife, he says, you will at least be my tree. Laurel will wreathe his hair, his lyre and his quiver; it will accompany Roman generals in their triumphs up to the Capitol; it will stand guard at the doorposts of Augustus, either side of the oak. And because Apollo’s hair is never cut, her leaves will stay green forever. The laurel, Ovid says, bowed its new branches and seemed to nod its top like a head.

Is that consent, or only the wind? Ovid leaves it open. The political compliment is less ambiguous. In 27 BCE, as Augustus himself records in his Res Gestae, the Senate decreed that the doorposts of his house be dressed with laurels and a civic crown of oak be fixed above the door. Ovid wrote a love story that ends at the emperor’s front gate. Augustus exiled him to the Black Sea all the same.

Older Daphnes and the crown at Delphi

Ovid was retelling, not inventing. Greek writers knew Daphne as a daughter of the Ladon, a river in Arcadia, or of Amyclas of Sparta. In the version collected by Parthenius in the first century BCE, a young man named Leucippus disguises himself as a girl to join Daphne’s band of huntresses. Apollo, jealous, puts it into the girls’ heads to bathe, and when Leucippus is unmasked they kill him. Apollo pursues Daphne, and she prays to Zeus to be taken from among mortals. Pausanias knew the Leucippus story too. Hyginus, in his Latin handbook, has Earth receive Daphne and turn her into the laurel.

Pausanias thought this love was the simple reason the prize at the Pythian Games was a crown of laurel. Delphic tradition went further, claiming that Apollo’s very first temple there was a hut made of laurel branches brought from the vale of Tempe, through which the Peneus flows. The tree was everywhere in Apollo’s cult long before Ovid gave it a back-story with a chase in it.

The laurel after Ovid

The crown kept travelling. In 1341 Petrarch was crowned with laurel on the Capitol in Rome, and his poems to Laura play constantly on lauro, laurel. In the early 1620s the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved Apollo and Daphne in marble for Cardinal Scipione Borghese: leaves break from her fingertips and bark climbs her legs as the god’s hand reaches her waist. A Latin couplet on the base, by Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, moralises the scene: whoever chases the joys of fleeting beauty ends with a hand full of leaves, or bitter berries. The statue is still in the Galleria Borghese, still drawing crowds.

The archer’s other work continued too. The same mischievous god turns up, wounded by his own weapon, in Apuleius’s tale of Psyche and Eros. And the same plot – a nymph who escapes a god by becoming a plant – reappears later in the same book of Ovid as the story of Pan and Syrinx, told in our essay on Pan. The laurel on a winner’s head is a strange prize once you know where it came from: a trophy grown out of someone who said no.