Helios

Six days the crew feasted, and for six days the meat lowed at them from the spits. The flayed hides crept along the sand of their own accord. The flesh bellowed, raw and roasting alike, in the voice of the herd it had come from. The men of Odysseus ate anyway, because they had been penned on that island for a month by a wind that would not turn, and because a god’s beef, in the end, smells like beef. Far above them, on his ordinary climb through an ordinary morning, the owner of the cattle had not noticed a thing.

Hold on to that, because Helios is the god who is supposed to see everything.

The Greeks meant this as a job description, not a compliment. When Agamemnon stands over the throats of the sacrificial lambs to seal the truce before Paris and Menelaus fight, he calls first on Zeus and then, immediately, on the Sun, who beholds all things and hears all things, and asks him to witness the oath and to see that any man who breaks it pays. The rivers come next, then the earth, then the powers below who take vengeance on the dead. The Sun is second in that list because the Sun is the one you cannot lie to. He is up there all day. He is looking.

He came into the world in Hesiod’s account as one of three siblings who do the same work in shifts: Theia lay with Hyperion and bore great Helios, clear Selene the moon, and Eos the dawn. The Homeric Hymn to Helios gives his mother a different name, Euryphaessa, the Wide-Shining, which may simply be Theia wearing another epithet. Hyginus calls her Aethra. Homer usually does not trouble with a mother at all and names him only Hyperionides, or drops the patronymic altogether and calls the sun Hyperion outright, as if father and son were the same fire.

That Hymn is the nearest thing to a portrait anyone left. A golden helmet, and under its brim a gaze that goes through you. Rays beating off him hard enough to be painful. Bright locks blown back from the temples, framing a face designed to be recognised from very far away. A fine, rich robe glowing on his body and cracking in the wind of his own passage. Stallions carrying him. He climbs to the highest point of heaven, stops there, rests his team, and then drives them down the sky into Ocean. Ovid, centuries later, adds purple vestments and an emerald throne. Apollonius says you could pick his children out of a crowd by their eyes, which threw off rays of gold. What is strange is that Homer never puts him in a chariot at all. The Iliad and the Odyssey give him gates in the west and leave the machinery unexplained; the horses arrive with the Hymn, and once they arrive they never leave.

At dawn the four come up out of the water with the sea running off their flanks and steaming where the wheels cut it, and the salt dries white on the spokes before he is halfway up the morning. At night he goes home in a bowl. Stesichorus, writing about Heracles and Geryon, has Hyperion’s strong child step down into a cup of solid gold to cross Ocean and reach the deep of holy dark night, and his mother, and his wife, and his children. The cup floats him round the northern rim of the world back to where he started. Heracles once borrowed it to reach Erytheia and fetch Geryon’s cattle, and returned it afterwards, which is more courtesy than that hero usually managed.

Cattle are the thing. Circe, his own daughter, warned Odysseus about the island of Thrinacia: seven herds of cows and seven flocks of sheep, fifty head in each, no births to increase them and no deaths to thin them. Two more of his daughters, Phaethousa and Lampetie, borne to him by Neaera and carried off to the island as girls, pasture them forever. Immortal livestock on an island nobody farms, watched by two goddesses with nothing else to do. It is not a farm. It is a possession, and the whole point of it is that it is his.

It was Lampetie who told him. Not the all-seeing eye, not the god who beholds all things: his daughter, with her long robe trailing, running the news up to him that the beasts were dead. He went straight to the assembly of the gods, blazing, and said that if the crew of Odysseus did not pay for his cattle he would go down into the house of Hades and shine among the dead instead. That is the only leverage he has and he plays it at once. Zeus told him to keep shining on the fertile earth and promised to smash the ship in mid-ocean with a white-hot thunderbolt. He kept the promise. Only Odysseus came out of the water.

He sees everything and can do almost nothing about it.

The same helplessness runs through the story of his son. Phaethon, born to Clymene, came east to make his father admit him, and Helios swore he could have any gift he named. The boy named the chariot. His father begged him to choose again, and then, because a promise sworn is a promise kept, handed over the reins. The horses felt the light hands on them, understood at once, and ran. Mountains burned. Rivers went dry. Zeus shot the boy out of the sky to stop the world catching fire, and the sun’s father watched it happen from the ground, which is the only place in his whole existence he is ever described as standing still.

His other great intervention is an act of informing. In the Odyssey it is Helios who sees Ares and Aphrodite in bed and goes directly to Hephaestus with it, which produces the invisible bronze net, the trapped lovers and the laughter of every god who came to look. Aphrodite did not forget. In Ovid’s telling she repaid the witness with a love as ruinous as the one he exposed, and the god who was appointed to look at everything spent his days staring at a mortal girl called Leucothoe, seeing nothing else at all.

Only one place in Greece took him seriously. Pindar explains why. When the gods divided the earth by lot, Helios was absent, at work, and they carved up the world without him and left him nothing. When he pointed this out, Zeus offered to draw the lots again, and Helios refused, because from up there he had seen a land still under the sea and rising. Lachesis lifted her hand and swore the great oath, and the island came out of the water, and it was Rhodes. He fathered seven sons on the nymph Rhodos, and three of their line gave their names to Ialysos, Kamiros and Lindos. Diodorus says the Rhodians honoured Helios above every other god, as the ancestor from whom they were descended. They held games for him, the Halieia. Every year they drove a chariot and four horses off into the sea as an offering. And in their harbour they set up a bronze figure of him roughly thirty-three metres tall, finished around 280 BCE, which an earthquake brought down within sixty years. The Colossus of Rhodes has been famous for far longer than it stood.

Elsewhere the cult stayed thin. Greeks noticed that other peoples worshipped the sun directly, and treated the fact as a difference between those peoples and themselves. Anaxagoras was in serious trouble for saying that the sun was not a god but a large hot stone. Pausanias records that Helios and Poseidon once went to law over Corinth with the hundred-handed Briareos as arbitrator, and that Helios was awarded the heights above the city, the Acrocorinth, whereupon he handed the whole thing over to Aphrodite. Even his winnings he gave away. From the fifth century the Greeks began quietly folding him into Apollo, and by the Hellenistic age the two were nearly interchangeable, though no Greek poet ever went so far as to put Apollo in the chariot. It was Rome that took him seriously, as Sol, with a priesthood and an imperial cult that lasted until Christianity displaced it. The god who could barely fill a shrine in Attica ended up on the coinage of an empire.

Set his powers out and they are enormous and oddly narrow. Light and heat, first, which are not small things: Diodorus has him dry the drowned mud of Rhodes into dry land and start life breeding in the warm silt. Sight and hearing that reach wherever the light reaches, which is what makes him the guarantor of oaths and the tale-bearer of Olympos. Warmth used as a weapon in the fable, where Boreas blows himself out trying to strip a traveller of his cloak and Helios simply shines until the man undresses himself and goes swimming.

Set his weaknesses out and they are all the same weakness. He is on rails. He rises, climbs, halts at noon, descends, floats home in a golden bowl and does it again, and the one time he threatens to stop, everyone treats it as the end of the world, which it is. His vision has a hole in it exactly where he is not currently looking, which is why a daughter had to run and tell him about his own cattle. He cannot punish anyone. He petitions. He could not keep his son off the box, or save him once he was on it, or do anything but watch. The all-seeing eye of the Greek sky spends most of its story asking somebody else to act.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Helios in Greek mythology?

Helios is the Greek god of the sun, the son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia and the brother of Selene the moon and Eos the dawn. He drives the sun across the sky each day in a chariot pulled by four stallions, and he is described as the god who sees and hears everything.

What are the cattle of Helios?

The cattle of Helios are seven herds of immortal cows and seven flocks of sheep, fifty head in each, pastured on the island of Thrinacia by his daughters Phaethousa and Lampetie. They never breed and never die. When the starving crew of Odysseus slaughtered and ate some of them, Helios demanded justice from Zeus, who destroyed the ship with a thunderbolt and drowned every man aboard except Odysseus.

Are Helios and Apollo the same god?

No. Helios and Apollo began as entirely separate gods, and the Greeks only started identifying them with each other from the fifth century BCE, with the association growing stronger in the Hellenistic period. Even then the merger was never complete: no Greek poet ever put Apollo in the chariot of the sun.

Why is Helios connected to Rhodes?

Helios was absent when the gods divided the earth by lot, so he received nothing. He asked instead for an island he had seen rising from the sea, and that island was Rhodes. He fathered seven sons there on the nymph Rhodos, the Rhodians honoured him above all other gods, and they raised the Colossus of Rhodes, a bronze statue of him about thirty-three metres tall, in their harbour.

How does Helios travel back east at night?

Helios crosses the sky from east to west by day, and at night he returns in a great cup of solid gold that carries him around the streams of Ocean back to his starting point. Stesichorus describes him stepping down into the cup to reach his mother, his wife and his children in the dark. Heracles borrowed the same vessel to sail to Erytheia for the cattle of Geryon.

Related Entries

Phaethon, Hyperion, Theia, Selene, Eos, Apollo, Zeus, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Ares, Demeter, Geryon, Ra, Shamash, Surya