"Olympians of eastern origin...Apollo and...Artemis...the great Python, who would continue to be important in the Apollo myth...It is this Asia  Minor connection that makes appropriate Artemis' and Apollo's support of the Trojans in the Iliad. As anyone who has seen depictions of the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus will realize, the Artemis whom the Greeks would see as a virginal huntress was at one time clearly a goddess of fertility."  "Apollo was a complex god of many aspects, among them light, the sun, the arts, and, as his association with the great prophetic center of Delphi would indicate, prophecy. His motto...is "Know thyself." Like the Vedic Indra and Rudra (later Śiva) Indo-European archer, he is a version of the god-hero who defeats the monster--in this case, the Python. Almost always the monster-dragon-serpent is associated with the chthonic powers of the ancient great mother, whose powers are then taken over by the Indo-European patriarchy. In the case of the Greeks, this takeover is indicated not only by the replacement of the goddess cult at Delphi with that of Apollo, but by the myth of the trial of Orestes at Athens for the revenge killing of his mother, Clytemnestra. At this trial, as depicted by Aeschylus in the Eumenides, Apollo absolves Orestes on the grounds that the mother is not the real parent, only the vessel of the seed placed there by the father."  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Sources:  From Olympus to Camelot by David Leeming