Domain: Motherhood; modesty and the sheltered birth Symbol: The palm tree of Delos, the veil, the wandering mother, the twin infants Roman Equivalent: Latona
Overview
Leto is the gentle Titaness of motherhood — daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, and mother by Zeus of the archer twins Apollo and Artemis. She belongs to the second generation of Titans, but her story is not of war or cosmic order; it is the intensely human tale of a mother who must wander the whole earth to find a place to give birth, hounded at every step by the jealousy of a queen. Her name was linked by the Greeks to gentleness and to concealment, the modest and retiring quality of one who keeps to the shadows — and there is a quiet, veiled softness to her even in the myths where she suffers most.
When Zeus took her and she conceived his children, the wrath of his wife Hera fell on her, and Leto became the wanderer of Greek myth: driven from land to land, refused shelter everywhere because no place dared brave Hera's anger, carrying her unborn twins across the world in search of a scrap of ground willing to receive her. That her children turned out to be two of the great Olympians — the god of light and prophecy and the goddess of the hunt and the moon — makes her hard travail the prelude to a triumph, and Leto herself, once so persecuted, took an honored place among the gods as the mother of the twins.
Key Myths
The wandering birth on Delos. Pregnant by Zeus and pursued by Hera's jealousy, Leto could find no land willing to let her give birth, for Hera had forbidden any place under the sun to receive her. At last the barren floating island of Delos — poor, rootless, with nothing to lose — agreed to shelter her in exchange for the promise of the temple her son would raise there. Clinging to a palm tree, Leto labored nine days and nights, for Hera withheld the goddess of childbirth; Artemis was born first and at once helped her mother deliver her twin, and then Apollo came into the light. Delos, rewarded, was fixed forever in the sea and became the god's own bright sanctuary.
Hera's long persecution. Even the wandering was not the end of Hera's wrath. The serpent Python was sent to chase Leto across the earth, and later the giant Tityos assaulted her — for which her children struck him down, Apollo and Artemis avenging their mother with their arrows. The myth turns again and again on the twins as their mother's protectors: the persecuted wanderer becomes, through her children, untouchable.
The mother avenged: Niobe. When Niobe, queen of Thebes and mother of fourteen, boasted that she was greater than Leto because she had borne so many children to Leto's mere two, the insult was answered without mercy. Apollo and Artemis came with their bows and killed all of Niobe's children, the sons and then the daughters, until she was left childless and wept herself into stone. It is the darkest of the Leto myths — the gentle mother whose honor, once mocked, is defended by the terrible aim of her divine twins.