Although Apollo was not the god of the sun in classical times--that honor belonged to Helios--he had a special relationship with the sun because of his role as the god of light and enlightenment. No doubt he could have talked Helios into parking the solar chariot for a while if he'd had good enough reason.

To do so for the express purpose of killing the crops, however, would have been an egregious trespass onto Demeter's bailiwick, and the harvest goddess would have been justifiably furious. As Elizabeth Vandiver explains in Lecture 11, "Laughter-Loving Aphrodite," all of the gods except Zeus are generally constrained by their own spheres of influence and as a rule they do not venture into one another's domain.