Leto

Leto was born to Coeus and Phoebe, two of the twelve Titans who had ruled the cosmos before the rise of Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled from Olympus with his thunderbolt. Coeus was the Titan of the inquisitive mind, and Phoebe was the Titaness of the moon and prophecy, the grandmother of Apollo through whom his gift of prophecy would flow. Leto grew up in the twilight of the Titan age, and when the Titanomachy, the war between the old Titans and the young Olympian gods, ended with Zeus's victory, she was spared the punishments that fell upon her kin. She was beautiful and gentle, and she attracted the eye of Zeus himself. The king of the gods desired her, and she conceived twin children: a boy and a girl who would become two of the most powerful deities in the Greek pantheon.

But Hera, the queen of Olympus and goddess of marriage, learned of the affair and was consumed by jealousy. She was Zeus's wife and sister, and she had sworn to punish every woman who bore his children. Her vengeance against Leto was absolute and cruel. She sent the monstrous serpent Python, a creature born from the mud left after the great flood, to pursue the pregnant Titaness across the earth. More terribly, she decreed that no land fixed beneath the sun, no earth anchored to the foundations of the world, would allow Leto to give birth upon it. Leto wandered from place to place, her belly swollen with the twins, begging every island and every shore for shelter. But Hera's command was feared even more than Zeus's love, and every land refused her. The earth itself had been warned, and the waters rose to prevent her from touching solid ground.

For nine days and nine nights Leto wandered in agony, her labour pains growing sharper with every hour. She crossed the Aegean, the sea between Greece and the coast of Asia Minor, and she came at last to a tiny island called Ortygia, a floating rock that drifted upon the waves and was not anchored to the earth beneath. The island was barren and windswept, but it was not fixed land, and Hera's curse did not apply. Leto fell upon the shore and grasped the trunk of a palm tree that grew there, bending it with her weight as the first birth pang seized her. The island accepted her, and in that moment it became sacred. Some said that Poseidon, the god of the sea and earthquakes, raised the island from the waves with his trident to give her refuge; others said that Zeus himself commanded the winds to carry her there. Leto gave birth first to Artemis, the goddess who would become the huntress, and then, with Artemis's own infant hands assisting, to Apollo, the god who would become the sun of the Greek world. The moment the twins were born, the island fixed itself to the earth with four pillars of adamant, and from that day it was called Delos, the revealed one, the place that had been hidden no more.

The birth was not the end of Leto's trials. Hera's jealousy continued, and she kept Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, away from Delos, prolonging Leto's labour until the other goddesses bribed Hera with a golden necklace and Eileithyia was allowed to come. After the birth, Leto and her children were not safe. The island of Cos tried to welcome her, but Hera drove her away. She wandered to Lycia, a kingdom on the coast of Asia Minor, and came thirsty to a pool where peasants were drawing water. She begged for a drink, but the peasants, fearing Hera's wrath, stirred the mud of the pool to make it undrinkable. Leto, enraged by their cruelty, transformed them into frogs, condemning them to live in the murky water they had made foul, croaking and leaping forever. The pool became a marsh, and the frogs of Lycia were said to be the descendants of those peasants to this day.

In time, Apollo and Artemis grew to adulthood with supernatural speed. Apollo claimed Delphi, the sacred oracle on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, by slaying the serpent Python that had pursued his mother. He established his temple there, and the Pythian Games were held in honour of his victory. Artemis claimed the wilderness, the mountains and forests where she hunted with her nymph companions, and she became the protector of young women and the bringer of swift death. Leto remained in the background, the mother of two gods who had outgrown her need. But she was honoured at Delos, where her temple stood beside Apollo's, and the island became a place of pilgrimage. Every four years the Delia festival was held, celebrating the birth of the twins, and athletes and musicians came from across the Greek world to compete in their honour.

Leto's story also intersected with one of the most terrible tragedies in Greek myth. Niobe, the queen of Thebes and daughter of Tantalus, the king who was condemned to eternal hunger in Tartarus, the deepest pit of the Underworld, boasted that she was greater than Leto because she had fourteen children while Leto had only two. Leto heard the boast from her sanctuary on Delos and cried out to her children. Apollo and Artemis answered with arrows of gold and silver, and they slew all fourteen of Niobe's children in a single day. Leto did not order the massacre, but she did not prevent it. The gods had made her suffering the foundation of their power, and her honour was not to be questioned by any mortal.