Leto

Summary

Leto in Greek myth is the mother of Apollo and Artemis by Zeus. Her name in Greek is Λητώ, Lētō, in Doric Λατώ, Latō, and in Latin Latona. Hesiod makes her the daughter of the Titans Koios and Phoebe and describes her: "dark-gowned Leto, always mild, kind to men and to the deathless gods, mild from the beginning, gentlest in all Olympus". Her sister Asteria is the mother of Hecate. Theogony 404–411 and 918–920.

Her fullest story is in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Pregnant by Zeus, Leto roamed the lands in her labour: Crete, Athens, Aegina and Euboea, Mount Athos and Mount Pelion, Samos, Lesbos and Chios, Naxos and Paros, land after land, asking whether any would be willing to be a home for her son; all of them trembled and feared, and none, not even the richest, dared receive him. Then she set foot on Delos, the poor rocky island, and said: Delos, if you will be my son's dwelling and build him a rich temple, no other will touch you; you will never be rich in oxen or sheep or vines, but people will bring you hecatombs, and you will feed those who live on you from the hands of strangers. Delos rejoiced, but feared that the god, once born, would scorn her rocky soil and thrust her with his feet into the depths of the sea, and asked for a great oath. Leto swore by Earth, Heaven and the water of Styx that Apollo would have his altar and precinct there and would honour Delos above every land.

Then Leto was in labour nine days and nine nights, with the chief goddesses around her, except Hera, who sat in Zeus's house and kept Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, on the top of Olympus under golden clouds, unaware of what was happening, out of jealousy of Leto. The goddesses sent Iris to Eileithyia, promising her a necklace of golden threads nine cubits long, and told her to call her away from Hera. As soon as Eileithyia set foot on Delos the pains came on Leto: she threw her arms round a palm tree and knelt on the soft meadow, the earth laughed beneath her, and the child leapt out into the light. The goddesses washed him in sweet water and wrapped him in a white garment; Leto did not give him the breast, but Themis gave him nectar and ambrosia with her own hands. When he had tasted them he spoke: the lyre and the curved bow shall be dear to me, and I will declare to men the unfailing will of Zeus. Delos was laden with gold, and blossomed as a mountain-top blossoms with woodland flowers.

The Library says Hera hunted Leto over the whole earth until she came to Delos, where she bore Artemis first, and the daughter then helped her mother deliver Apollo; the hymn puts Artemis's birth on Ortygia. Afterwards the children defend their mother. The giant Tityus tried to violate Leto when she came to Delphi, she called her children, and they shot him down; vultures still eat his heart in the house of Hades. Niobe boasted to Leto that she had twelve children and Leto only two, and Apollo killed her six sons and Artemis her six daughters. And she stands by her son: when Apollo killed the Cyclopes in anger over his son Asclepius, Zeus would have hurled him into Tartarus, but Leto interceded and his punishment became a year's service to a mortal.

The idea her story turns on is that she is a mother with no place. Every land refuses her for fear of the child she carries; she seeks a land to take refuge in and finds none, until the poorest of the islands takes her in and receives in return the god's temple and the offerings of all mankind. Her part in the story is to carry, to seek refuge, to give birth, and then to stand beside her children. That is why the hymn opens with her in Zeus's house: when Apollo comes in and the gods tremble and rise from their seats, Leto alone stays beside Zeus, unstrings his bow, closes his quiver, hangs them on a golden peg and makes him sit down.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read it. Take the final -ō, the Greek ending of the noun, off Doric Λᾱτώ, Lātō, and lāt- remains: l, a long ā in Doric, then t. We read it as Arabic lādha. In Lane lādha bihi is "he had recourse to it (a mountain) for refuge or protection or preservation; sought, or took, refuge in it; joined himself to him", and a malādh is "a place to which one has recourse for refuge". L is l, the long ā of the Doric form is the ā of lādha, and dh becomes t, both dental sounds that interchange under the Juthoor laws. That is what the whole hymn makes her: a mother who roams the earth seeking a refuge for her son and finds none until she shelters on Delos. Ovid says in her story that Delos, the floating island, "almost refused a refuge".

Linguistic Root

LSJ gives no origin for the name. Plato in the Cratylus explains it from her gentleness: Leto is so named because she is willing to grant whatever is asked of her, and he adds that many foreigners call her "Letho", perhaps for the smooth and gentle quality of her character. This is the gentleness Hesiod describes.

Beekes's etymological dictionary of Greek calls the origin of the name unknown, cites its oldest witness in Mycenaean writing, ra-to, that is Lātō, with the long ā the Doric form keeps, mentions the familiar derivation from Lycian lada, "wife", and notes that ancient sources made her originally the Night. Lewy built a Semitic reading on this: he saw the middle letter wavering between the t of Λητώ, the th of Ληθώ, which Plato says foreigners used, and the d of Λήδα, took the wavering as the mark of a sound foreign to Greek, and read the name from Hebrew l-w-ṭ, "to cover, veil": Leto the Night that veils. Beekes does not accept this. But the wavering of the letter between t and th stands in the witnesses, and it is what one expects of a sound like dh, which Greek lacks, so the weak point of the t is eased, and lādha itself joins taking refuge and concealing oneself.

In Lane lādha bihi is to have recourse to someone or something for refuge or protection, to take refuge, to conceal or fortify oneself by it, to join oneself to someone and call on him for help; lādha al-ṭarīqu bi-l-dār is said of a road that runs round a house; a lawdh is the side of a mountain or the bend of a valley; and malādh and milwadha are a fortress, a refuge. In the Qurʾān those "who steal away, sheltering behind one another" are said to go liwādhan. The word joins refuge and concealment, and Leto's story holds both: she roams looking for a refuge, then hides on Delos until she gives birth.

As for the letters: l is l, dh becomes Greek t, and the long ā of lādha stays in Doric Λᾱτώ and becomes in Ionic another long vowel, as long ā generally does in that dialect. The weak points are that Arabic dh usually appears in Greek as d, that Plato's ancient explanation takes the name from gentleness, not refuge, and that the name is not known in any Semitic tongue.

Key Mythic Narratives

Leto at Buto

Herodotus heard in Egypt that in the city of Buto, in the Delta, there was a temple of a goddess he calls "Leto", with a famous oracle, and that near the temple was a lake with an island called Khemmis, which the Egyptians say floats. Herodotus never saw it float or move, but saw on it a great temple of Apollo, three altars and many palm trees. The Egyptians say that Leto, one of the eight gods who first came to be, lived at Buto, took Apollo in charge from Isis, and hid him on this island when Typhon came hunting through the world for the son of Osiris, and that is why the island floats. Apollo for them is Horus, Artemis is Bubastis, and Leto was their nurse and preserver. So the Leto who sought a refuge for her child on Delos gives refuge to another's child at Buto, and both islands have palms and water.

The peasants who became frogs

Ovid tells that Leto fled from Delos after the birth, driven by Hera's jealousy, carrying the twins at her breast, until she reached Lycia in the summer heat, thirsty, her breasts dry. She saw a pool of clear water in a valley, with peasants gathering reeds beside it, and knelt to drink, but they forbade her. She said: water is the right of all; nature has not made the sun and air and water anyone's property; I do not want to bathe, only to drink; look at the children stretching out their arms to you. They persisted, abused her, and waded into the pool until they had muddied it. She raised her hands to heaven and said: may you live in that pool for ever; and they became frogs, leaping in the water and croaking.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Greek myths reads the twins as "the two principal heavenly bodies", Apollo the sun and Artemis the moon, and makes Artemis's protection of childbirth "the lunar calendar for counting pregnancy, nine lunar months". The essay does not mention Leto. If the children are the sun and moon, their mother is the one Hesiod calls "dark-gowned", from whom the two lights come. In the hymn her labour lasts nine days and nine nights, and the necklace that buys Eileithyia is nine cubits long.

The Greek essay reads the name of Theia, mother of the sun, moon and dawn in another genealogy, from ḍiyāʾ, radiance. So the lights are born twice in Greek genealogy: from Theia, radiance, in the generation of the Titans, and from dark-gowned Leto in the generation of Zeus.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The goddess of Buto whom Herodotus calls Leto is for the Egyptians Wadjet, the cobra who guards the king, and in Herodotus's story she hides the child Horus on the island of Khemmis from Seth. Both are a mother or nurse who hides the child on an island from a pursuer who wants him.

Egypt also has a goddess who guards birth itself, Taweret, the pregnant hippopotamus, invoked in the words spoken at a birth: "Ipet the Great makes her protection". In the hymn Leto's labour is held up because Hera keeps back the goddess of childbirth, and it does not end until she comes. Plutarch says that "Thueris", Taweret, was Seth's concubine who left him and came over to Horus, so she, like Herodotus's Leto, stands on the side of the child Horus against Seth.

Leto is the mother of twins, so she belongs to the story of the divine twins. In India Saraṇyū is twice the mother of twins, Yama and Yamī and then the Aśvins, and she vanishes on the way to her husband's house and the gods hide her. In both stories the mother vanishes or is hunted, and the twins grow up after her.