Why the site name — aegletes (Apollo as enlightened) — and the image above of Apollo with his lyre? It begins with the fact that I’ve long had an interest in the earliest beliefs of mankind and in particular with how they became synthesized and stylized in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Of all the Greek deities, Apollo best represents those qualities which I most hold dear: enlightenment, balance and harmony, love of music and the arts, justice for the defenseless (witness his defense of Orestes), physical love (he was unashamed about about his sexual pursuits), healer and protector from disease, the list goes on. So it seemed appropriate to design my presence on the web around the many attributes of Apollo taken from the primary literary sources from ancient Greek literature.

Thus, this site is organized around my various interests as they intersect with Apollo’s attributes: music and the arts (musagetes, that is, Apollo as leader of the muses), public policy and justice (alexikakos: Apollo as defender from evil), travel (nomios or Apollo the wayfarer), my identity as a gay man (lykios, Apollo of the wolves), health and fitness (akesios, that is, Apollo as healer), with more to follow. This may seem an odd way of organizing a site on the web but it combines my love of myth with my instinct for organization and categorization.

Incidentally, I’ve had a home page on the web since the very early 1990s, with my original intent being to give something back to the web community at a time when the web didn’t have the abundance of material covering my interests (music, politics, literature, to name three) as it does today. So as those resources have grown in number and quality, my motivation in maintaining a presence on the web has changed to one of simply keeping my friends and family up to date on what I’m doing and thinking these days. If this means this site comes across as very narrowly focused, so be it. It covers, after all, those things that matter the most to me. So enjoy and thanks for stopping by. If you’d like to comment, feel free to e-mail me at aegletes at mac dot com. I spell this out so as to avoid spam. Please don’t send me spam or abusive e-mail. I really hate that.