Helios

For other uses, see Helios (disambiguation).

In Greek mythology, Helios (Ήλιος - homeric ηέλιος, Doric αέλιος and άλιος (halios), Cretan αβέλιος) was the son of king-god Hyperion (or Hephaestus) and Theia (or Basileia or Aethra), and brother of Eos and Selene. He was a powerful king-god of north and western Peloponnesus, but his kingdom extended from Syria and Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean. Later he was deified and his name was given to the western part of Peloponnesus (Ήλις - Elis) and the heavenly body (star), the Sun. He is not a personification of the Sun, as some people think, but a real person who lived in pre-cataclysmic times (see also Aeetes and Basileia (Mythology). His "sons" (descendants) were forced to leave Peloponnesus (after a great war) and they went to other countries (Crete, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Sicily, some islands in the Atlantic Ocean etc.), where they built colonies.

According to Manetho, the first king-gods of pre-cataclysmic Egypt were Hephaestus, Helios (son of Hephaestus), Agathodaemon, Cronus, Osiris and Isis, Typhon (brother of Osiris), Horus (son of Osiris and Isis), Ares, Anoubis, Heracles, Apollo, Ammon, Tithoes, Sosos and Zeus. Then, the first human king of Egypt after the Cataclysm was Menes from Thines.

Herodotus writes that according to the priests of Memphis (a pre-cataclysmic Greek colony founded by Epaphus, the son of Io from Argos), Heracles was a king-god of Egypt around 17500 BC. Pan was another king-god who ruled before Heracles. Then, it was Osiris who ruled around 15500 BC and later Horus, the son of Osiris. The first human king of Egypt after Horus was Min. The priests were showing to him the statues of 341 kings who had ruled Egypt after Min, and Herodotus estimates that from his reign there had been 11340 years. Therefore, Min ruled Egypt around 11800 BC.

According to Diodorus Siculus (1,23-28), the Egyptian priests told him that Helios ruled Egypt 23000 years before Alexander the Great (or around 23330 BC). Also, from Osiris and Isis to Alexander the Great there had been more than 10000 years or, according to others, almost 23000.

Homer often calls him simply Titan or Hyperion (*poetically), while Hesiod (Theogony 371) and the Homeric Hymn separate him as a son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia (Hesiod) or Euryphaessa (Homeric Hymn) and brother of the goddesses Selene, the moon, and Eos, the dawn. The names of these three were also the common Greek words for sun, moon and dawn.

Helios was imagined as a handsome god crowned with the shining aureole of the sun, who drove a chariot across the sky each day to earth-circling Oceanos and through the world-ocean returned to the East at night. Homer described it as drawn by solar bulls (Iliad xvi.779); later Pindar saw it as drawn by "fire-darting steeds" (Olympian Ode 7.71). Still later, the horses were given fiery names: Pyrios, Aeos, Aethon and Phlegon.

As time passed, Helios was increasingly identified with the god of light, Apollo. The equivalent of Helios in Roman mythology was Sol, Latin for Sun.

Greek mythology

The best known story involving Helios is that of his son Phaëton (Φαέθων), who attempted to drive his father's chariot but lost control and set the earth on fire.

Helios was sometimes referred to with the epithet Helios Panoptes ("the all-seeing"). In the story told in the hall of Alcinous in the Odyssey (viii.300ff), Aphrodite, the consort of Hephaestus secretly bedded Ares. All-seeing Helios, lord of the sun, spied on them and told Hephaestus who ensnared the two lovers in nets invisibly fine, to punish them.

In the Odyssey (book XII), Odysseus and his surviving crew landed on Thrinacia, an island sacred to the sun god, whom Circe names Hyperion rather than Helios:

You will now come to the Thrinacian island, and here you will see many herds of cattle and flocks of sheep belonging to the sun-god. There will be seven herds of cattle and seven flocks of sheep, with fifty heads in each flock. They do not breed, nor do they become fewer in number, and they are tended by the goddesses Phaethusa and Lampetia, who are children of the sun-god Hyperion by Neaera. Their mother when she had borne them and had done suckling them sent them to the Thrinacian island, which was a long way off, to live there and look after their father's flocks and herds."

There, the sacred red cattle of the sun were kept. Though Odysseus warned his men not to, they impiously killed and ate some of the cattle. The guardians of the island, Helios' daughters, told their father. Helios, however, appealed to Zeus, who destroyed the ship and killed all the men except for Odysseus.

In one Greek vase painting, Helios appears riding across the sea in the cup of the Delphic tripod which appears to be a solar reference. Athenaeus in Deipnosophistae related that, at the hour of sunset, Helios climbed into a great golden cup in which he passes from the Hesperides in the farthest west to the land of the Ethiops, with whom he passes the dark hours. While Heracles traveled to Erytheia to retrieve the cattle of Geryon, he crossed the Libyan desert and was so frustrated at the heat that he shot an arrow at Helios, the sun. Helios begged him to stop and Heracles demanded the golden cup which Helios used to sail across the sea every night, from the west to the east. Heracles used this golden cup to reach Erytheia.

Solar Apollo with the radiant halo of Helios in a Roman floor mosaic, El Djem, Tunisia, late 2nd century

By the Oceanid Perse, Helios became the father of Aeëtes, Circe, and Pasiphaë. His other children are Phaethusa ("radiant"), Lampetia ("shining") and Phaëton.

Helios and Apollo

Apollo, as he appears in Homer, is a plague-dealing god with a silver (not golden) bow and has no solar features. "Different names may refer to the same being," Walter Burkert observes (1985:120), "or else they may be consciously equated, as in the case of Apollo and Helios."

The earliest certain reference to Apollo identified with the sun titan Helios appears in the surviving fragments of Euripides' play Phaethon in a speech near the end (fr 781 N²), Clymene, Phaethon's mother, laments that Helios has destroyed her child, that Helios whom men rightly call Apollo (the name Apollo here understood to mean Apollon "Destroyer").

By Hellenistic times Apollo had become closely connected with the sun in cult. His epithet Phoebus "shining", drawn from Helios, was later also applied by Latin poets to the sun-god Sol.

Coin of Roman Emperor Constantine I depicting Sol Invictus/Apollo with the legend SOLI INVICTO COMITI, c. 315.

The identification became a commonplace in philosophic texts and appears in the writing of Parmenides, Empedocles, Plutarch and Crates of Thebes among others, as well as appearing in some Orphic texts. Pseudo-Eratosthenes writes about Orpheus in Catasterismi, section 24:

But having gone down into Hades because of his wife and seeing what sort of things were there, he did not continue to worship Dionysus, because of whom he was famous, but he thought Helios to be the greatest of the gods, Helios whom he also addressed as Apollo. Rousing himself each night toward dawn and climbing the mountain called Pangaion, he would await the sun's rising, so that he might see it first. Therefore Dionysus, being angry with him, sent the Bassarides, as Aeschylus the tragedian says; they tore him apart and scattered the limbs.

Dionysus and Asclepius are sometimes also identified with this Apollo Helios.

Classical Latin poets also used Phoebus as a byname for the sun-god, whence come common references in later European poetry to Phoebus and his car ("chariot") as a metaphor for the sun. But in particular instances in myth, Apollo and Helios are distinct. The sun-god, the son of Hyperion, with his sun chariot, though often called Phoebus ("shining") is not called Apollo except in purposeful non-traditional identifications. Roman poets often referred to the sun god as Titan.

Despite these identifications, Apollo was never actually described by the Greek poets driving the chariot of the sun, although it was common practice among Latin poets.

Cult of Helios

L.R. Farnell assumed "that sun-worship had once been prevalent and powerful among the people of the pre-Hellenic culture, but that very few of the communities of the later historic period retained it as a potent factor of the state religion." Our largely Attic literary sources tend to give us an unavoidable Athenian bias when we look at ancient Greek religion, and "no Athenian could be expected to worship Helios or Selene," J. Burnet observes, "but he might think them to be gods, since Helios was the great god of Rhodes and Selene was worshiped at Elis and elsewhere." Aristophanes' Peace (406-13) contrasts the worship of Helios and Selene with that of the more essentially Greek Twelve Olympians, as the representative gods of the Achaemenid Persians; all the evidence shows that Helios and Selene were minor gods to the Greeks.

"The island of Rhodes is almost the only place where Helios enjoys an important cult", Burkert asserts (p 174), instancing a spectacular rite in which a quadriga, a chariot drawn by four horses, is driven over a precipice into the sea, with its overtones of the plight of Phaethon noted. There annual gymnastic tournaments were held in his honor. The Colossus of Rhodes was dedicated to him.

Helios also had a significant cult on the acropolis of Corinth on the Greek mainland.

The tension between the mainstream traditional religious veneration of Helios, which had become enriched with ethical values and poetical symbolism in Pindar, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the Ionian proto-scientific examination of Helios the Sun, a phenomenon of the study Greeks termed meteora, clashed in the trial of Anaxagoras ca 450 BCE, a forerunner of the culturally traumatic trial of Socrates for irreligion, in 399.

In Plato's Republic (516B), Helios, the Sun, is the symbolic offspring of the idea of the Good.

Helios Megistos

In Late Antiquity a cult of Helios Megistos ("Great Helios") drew to the image of Helios a number of syncretic elements, which have been analysed in detail by W. Fauth by means of a series of late Greek texts, namely: an Orphic Hymn to Helios; the so-called Mithras Liturgy, where Helios rules the elements; spells and incantations invoking Helios among the Greek Magical Papyri; a Hymn to Helios by Proclus; Julian's Oration to Helios, the last stand of official paganism; and an episode in Nonnus' Dionysiaca.

Consorts/Children

1. Aegle
   1. Charites
      1. Aglaea
      2. Euphrosyne
      3. Thalia
2. Clymene
   1. Heliades
      1. Aegiale
      2. Aetheria
      3. Helia
      4. Merope
      5. Phoebe
      6. Dioxippe
   2. Phaeton
3. Merope
4. Neaera
   1. Phaethusa
   2. Lampetia
5. Rhodus
   1. Elektryo
   2. Ochimus
   3. Cercaphus
   4. Macareus
   5. Actis
   6. Tenages
   7. Triopas
   8. Candalus
6. Perse
   1. Aegea
   2. Aeetes
   3. Calypso
   4. Circe
   5. Pasiphae
   6. Perses

Epithets

• Terpsimbrotos

See also

• Sun worship
• Sun chariot
• USS Helios (ARB-12)

References

• Walter Burkert, 1982. Greek Religion.
• Konrad Schauenburg, 1955. Helios: Archäologisch-mythologische Studien über den antiken (Mann)
• Karl Kerenyi. Apollo: The Wind, the Spirit, and the God: Four Studies
• Karl Kerenyi, 1951. The Gods of the Greeks, "The Sun, the Moon and their Family" pp 190-94 et passim.
• Angelopoulos, Athanasios G., New Lexicon of the Greek Mythology (2000) - ISBN 960-7931-28-9

External links

• Theoi Project, Helios references to the god in classical literature and art
• Greek Mythology Link, Helius summary of Helius myths
• Helios in the Synagogue: Did some ancient Jews worship the sun god?