Gods, Goddesses, and Ancient Legends
Theo Mercer 
Moments after her own birth, the newborn Diana turned and helped her mother deliver her twin Apollo. The virgin who would never bear a child of her own was a midwife before she was an hour old.
Actaeon did nothing wrong. He took a wrong turn in the woods and saw a goddess bathing — and for that accident Diana turned him into a stag and let his own hounds tear him apart.
Everyone knows Apollo as the sun god. An early Greek would have called that a mistake — the sun was Helios. Apollo only inherited the sky later, and mostly on Roman ground.
Apollo won his music contest with the satyr Marsyas by playing his lyre upside down. His prize, by the rules of the duel, was the right to flay the loser alive — and he took it.
The oracle told Croesus that if he attacked, Persia he would destroy a great empire. He attacked — and destroyed his own. Apollo never lied. He simply let confident men hear what they wanted to hear.
The arrows that made Apollo a god of healing were the same arrows that brought the plague. To the Romans, the power to kill and the power to cure were one weapon, pointed either way.
Apollo could foresee the future and cure the dying. He could not save the one boy he loved from a discus thrown in play — so he turned his blood into a flower that grieves every spring.
Arachne wove a tapestry so perfect that the goddess of weaving could not find a single flaw in it. That was the problem. It also showed, thread by thread, every crime the gods had committed.
Niobe boasted that her fourteen children made her greater than a goddess who had only two. By sundown all fourteen were dead — and Niobe had wept herself into a stone that still drips water today.
Before he lost his own son to the sky, Daedalus had murdered another boy for being too gifted. As he buried Icarus, a partridge watched from a ditch — and clapped its wings.