Apollo & the Lizard

This first-century Roman statue of a youthful god, Apollo, shows him just about to kill a lizard which is climbing up a tree trunk he is leaning against. It may be a version of the tale in which he kills a great dragon or serpent called Python at the place he was to establish his temple and sanctuary at Delphi in Greece. The beautiful god, with his supple body and feminine face, appealed to the Greeks' and Romans' adoration of physical beauty.

This myth is surely a dim memory of the Creator’s ancient promise that the serpent of Eden would be crushed by a great deliverer. He would not be a sexually evocative person of questionable gender, but a real man, a new Adam, battered and bleeding as He carried His cross up a hill in order to be nailed to it, and to die. It was the blood from the nailed hands of Christ which settled the serpent’s fate, not Apollo’s manicured palm. Christ exchanged His glory and beauty for the form of an ordinary man: