The Wandering Mother, and Delos and Lycia

Leto's importance in cult is as the mother of the twin archer-gods Apollo and Artemis, and her worship is generally bound up with theirs. The story of her persecuted wandering, unable to find any land willing to risk Hera's anger by sheltering her labour until the floating island of Delos received her, made Delos one of the holiest places in the Greek world, a Panhellenic sanctuary of Apollo whose sanctity in the historical period forbade both birth and death on the island.

Leto had her own strong local cult in Lycia in southern Anatolia, where the Letoon near Xanthos was the chief federal sanctuary of the Lycian League, and where a local tale, retold by Ovid, had her turn insolent peasants who fouled her drinking-water into frogs. The Romans called her Latona. Delos itself preserves physical evidence of Leto's cult: the Sanctuary of Apollo there included, alongside the god's own precinct, structures associated with his mother, and the island's Sacred Lake, drained only in the twentieth century, was traditionally linked in antiquity to her labour, though modern archaeology treats such specific identifications of individual features with the myth cautiously, as pious topography rather than settled fact.