Ovid's Metamorphoses gives Python an origin the earlier Homeric Hymn does not spell out in the same way, naming the serpent as a direct offspring of Gaia, the earth itself, formed from the residual mud and moisture left behind after the great flood sent in the age of Deucalion had receded. That parentage places Python among the oldest generation of monstrous beings in Greek myth, born of the earth before the current, settled cosmic order was fully in place, the same broad category that includes other chthonic offspring of Gaia challenging the Olympian gods for dominance over the world. Read this way, Apollo's killing of Python is not simply the clearing of a local pest but a small-scale version of the larger mythic pattern in which the younger, ordered gods of Olympus overcome monstrous, earth-born survivals from an older, less governed age of the world.
The killing's institutional afterlife is unusually well documented for a Greek myth: the Pythian Games, one of the four great Panhellenic athletic festivals alongside the Olympic, Nemean and Isthmian Games, were held at Delphi specifically in commemoration of Apollo's victory, and the Pythia, the priestess who sat at the oracle and delivered Apollo's prophecies while in a trance, carried a title drawn directly from the serpent's own name rather than from Apollo's. That naming choice is worth noting for what it implies: the oracle's most visible living office, the one ordinary visitors to Delphi actually consulted, was named after the primordial monster whose death made the sanctuary possible, keeping Python present in the institution's own vocabulary long after the killing itself had passed into founding legend.