Apollo had among his attributes that of healing and of avoiding plague. By Koronis he fathered Asklepios (shown above), revered in cult sites such as Epidauros as the god of healing. Indeed, the very oath known as the Hippocratic oath and dating to the 4th century BCE begins:

Ὄμνυμι Ἀπόλλωνα ἰητρὸν, καὶ Ἀσκληπιὸν, καὶ Ὑγείαν, καὶ Πανάκειαν, καὶ θεοὺς πάντας τε καὶ πάσας, ἵστορας ποιεύμενος, ἐπιτελέα ποιήσειν κατὰ δύναμιν καὶ κρίσιν ἐμὴν ὅρκον τόνδε καὶ ξυγγραφὴν τήνδε.

I swear by Apollo, Asklepios, Hygieia, and Panakea, and I take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following Oath.

There are many reasons why health, fitness, and proper diet matter to me. The foremost reason is that, aged over forty, I’m conscious of the fact that I can no longer assume I will be as fit and pain-free as I was when I was half this age. As the body ages, shedding fat, maintaining muscle mass, and avoiding injury all become gradually more difficult and require more conscious effort.

Another reason, however, is that I am a cancer survivor and, as such, feel a particular responsibility to myself to do everything to be the healthiest and strongest cancer survivor I can be. Cancer, while it has robbed me of many things, has taught me many lessons among which is that health is precious but often unpredictable. While it is the thing too many in our society today take for granted, it is also that one thing which, when lost, can completely overturn one’s sense of confidence, one’s finances, one’s ability to plan for the future. So while I live now with cancer in the sense that I will be subjected to frequent surveillance to guard against a relapse or new cancer, I also live with a renewed appreciation for sound living. This means eating foods that are good for me and engaging in strenuous and frequent resistance and cardiovascular training.

It would be insincere of me not to mention one other, perhaps far more superficial reason for good health. That is the Greek love of physical beauty, whether it be one’s own or of others. There was a reason for the centrality of the palaestra in Athenian society, as it constituted the one place where young and old could gather to engage in, admire, and promote the development of the body and of the mind. But it is in considering the connection between the development of the two that the beauty of the healthy body ceases to be merely superficial. After all, there was no sense of distinction between mind and body as we have today. I would go so far as to say that the modern monotheistic concept of soul has only served to undermine the realization that a sound body is inseparable from a sound mind (or spirit or whatever it is one might call the intellect). I don’t think of the mind as a ghost in the machine that is the body but rather as inseparable from the body. Just as we do not survive our own deaths, so do we prosper emotionally and intellectually as we prosper physically. Not only is physical health essential to clarity and quickness of mind, but I would go even further. The very act of physical exercise clears, emboldens and strengthens the spirit. So not only is the healthy body something to admire as a, for lack of a better word, work of art, but it is the very basis for a strength of spirit.