Helios

Summary

Helios is the sun and its god among the Greeks, and his name is the Greek word for the sun itself. Hesiod says Theia bore him to Hyperion, one of the Titans, together with Selene the moon and Eos the dawn. The thirty-first Homeric Hymn describes him in his chariot: he shines on men and gods, looks out piercingly from under a golden helmet, bright rays stream from his head, and horses draw him; when he reaches the top of the sky he halts, then drives his horses down through the sky to Ocean.

In the stories he is the one who sees. When the Greeks and Trojans swore to the duel of Menelaus and Paris, Agamemnon called on Zeus and "the Sun, that beholdest all things and hearest all things" to witness the oath. When Hades seized Persephone, only Hecate and Helios heard her cry; her mother Demeter wandered nine days with torches, then came to Helios, "watchman of both gods and men", stood before his horses and said: you look down from the upper air over all the earth and sea, so tell me. He told her that Zeus had given her daughter to Hades. He is also the one who saw Ares with Aphrodite and told her husband Hephaestus. Iliad 3.276–280; Hymn to Demeter 19–89; Odyssey 8.270–271 and 302.

His best-known story is the story of his cattle. On the island of Thrinacia he had seven herds of cows and seven flocks of sheep, fifty in each, which neither bore young nor died, kept by his daughters Phaethusa and Lampetie. Circe warned Odysseus: leave them unharmed and you will reach home; harm them and your ship and companions will be lost. Winds held the ship on the island for a month until the food ran out, Odysseus fell asleep, and his companions slaughtered the best of the cows. Lampetie brought the news to her father, who stood up among the gods and said: if they do not pay me fit atonement for my cattle, I will go down to Hades and shine among the dead. Zeus answered: shine on among the immortals and mortal men, and I will strike their ship with my thunderbolt. When they sailed he struck it, and all were lost except Odysseus. That is why the opening of the Odyssey says they ate the cattle of Helios and he took from them the day of their return.

The idea his stories turn on is that the sun passes over everything, so nothing done by day is hidden from it. That is why he is called to witness oaths, tells the mother where her daughter is, and tells the husband what his wife did. What is his own is kept by the same order: cattle whose number never grows or shrinks. When they are violated he threatens to take his light down to the dead, and Zeus keeps the order by punishing the offenders. The sun's light belongs to the living; if it went below, the world above would go dark.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Take the Greek nominative ending off Ἥλιος, Hēlios, and Hēli- remains, with h and l: Arabic halla, the reading the Greek essay prefers. In Lisān al-ʿArab, tahallala al-saḥāb bi-l-barq is said when clouds glitter and shine with lightning, tahallala wajhuhu when a face lights up, and halla al-hilāl when the new moon appears. Hebrew has a verb with the same letters meaning "to shine", used of the sun shining in the book of Job, and the Hebrew lexicon compares it with the Arabic. On this reading Helios is al-hāll, the one who appears above everything and shines, which is what the story makes him: the sun that sees what is done beneath it.

Linguistic Root

Helios and halla

Lisān al-ʿArab and Mukhtār al-Ṣiḥāḥ give "the clouds tahallala with their lightning: glittered", "a man's face tahallala with joy", and "the hilāl is the first night, the second and the third, then it is a moon". Brown, Driver and Briggs give הָלַל I as "shine", compare the Arabic of the new moon and its first appearing, and cite it of the sun in Job 31:26 and of the stars in Isaiah 13:10; from it comes hêlēl ben šāḥar in Isaiah 14:12, the shining star son of the dawn, read on the Shahar and Shalim page. In Arabic and Hebrew the root joins appearing and shining in the lights of the sky. The h-l-l root page gathers its witnesses in other names.

The sounds: the breathing at the start of the Greek word is h, l is l, the doubled l of halla appears single in Greek, and the case ending drops. The Greek lexicon, however, traces the word to an Indo-European form with s and w, and sets beside it Cretan ἀβέλιος with its w, Latin sōl and Lithuanian saulė. On that account the h is an old s, as the h of ἑπτά answers the s of Latin septem, and the w has no counterpart in halla. The same family takes in Sanskrit sūrya, which the Sūrya page reads as sirāj. So the two names belong to one Indo-European family, and our tongue reads them from two different roots.

Other readings in the essay

After halla the Greek essay lists three more readings: alla, to gleam and shine, from which comes alaq, brilliance; hayyala, to dazzle; and ull, the high light; it then suggests the name may be Īl plus -yos, the god of light. The first three are close to halla in sense. The essay reads his father Hyperion from ʿabara, "the one who crosses above", the sun crossing the sky, and Homer often calls Helios himself "Helios Hyperion". It reads his mother Theia as ḍiyāʾ, "radiance", with ḍ become th, the mother of the three lights.

Key Mythic Narratives

Phaethon

Ovid, the Roman poet, tells the story of Phaethon, the Sun's son by Clymene. A companion doubted his parentage, so he went to the Sun's palace to ask for a sign; his father swore by the Styx to give him whatever he asked, and he asked to drive the chariot for one day. His father warned him and could not take back his oath. When the horses felt the light load they bolted, and the earth burned: the Ethiopians' skin turned dark, Libya dried into desert, and the Nile fled and hid its head. Earth complained to Jupiter, who struck Phaethon with a thunderbolt, and he fell into the river Eridanus. His sisters wept for him until they became poplars, and their tears ran as amber. His father in grief refused to drive the chariot until the gods begged him.

The golden cup

On the way to Geryon's cattle the Sun's heat troubled Heracles, who bent his bow at the Sun; the Sun, admiring his boldness, gave him a golden goblet in which he crossed Ocean, and Heracles gave it back after carrying the cattle across in it.

The Sun's share

Pindar says that when Zeus and the gods divided the earth, Helios was away, and no share was marked out for him. When he mentioned it Zeus was ready to cast the lots again, but Helios refused, because he had seen land growing from the floor of the sea; he asked for it, and Rhodes rose from the water and became his. Pausanias reports that the Corinthians say Poseidon disputed their land with Helios and Briareos judged between them, giving Poseidon the Isthmus and Helios the height above the city; Pausanias adds that the Athenians had told a similar story about their own land before them, the story of Athena and Poseidon.

His children, and Helios and Apollo

His children include Circe, with whom Odysseus stayed a year, and her brother Aeetes, king of Colchis, borne to him by Perseis, daughter of Ocean. Some later writers made him Apollo himself, as the Greek lexicon notes from Euripides. The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" reads Apollo as a sun driving the chariot; in Homer and the Homeric Hymns the driver of the chariot is Helios.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" sets Helios in its table of natural phenomena and reads the god who drives the chariot as a description of the sun's daily course, as it reads Selene on her silver bull as the phases of the moon and rosy-fingered Eos as the colours of twilight.

In the texts themselves people speak of the sun as they would of a witness in their community: he is called with Zeus and Earth to an oath, sought out to tell what he saw, and owns a counted herd kept by his children. The Phaethon story joins a father who swore and could not take back his oath to a son who took on his father's work before he was able, and the earth burned.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Sūrya crosses the sky in a chariot drawn by seven mares and sees people at their work, and hymn 1.115 calls him the eye of Mitra, Varuṇa and Agni. Helios crosses it in a horse-drawn chariot, sees and hears everything, and is called to witness oaths. Indo-European scholars place the two names in one family. Helios's sister is Eos, the dawn, whose name Monier-Williams sets beside that of Uṣas in the Rigveda, and which the Greek essay reads from ḍawʾ, light.

In Babylon Shamash sees what people do and judges between them, and in the Avesta Mithra has a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes, so no breaker of a covenant escapes him. At Ugarit Shapsh travels between the world of the living and the world of the dead and helps Anat carry Baal's body, as Helios tells Demeter where her daughter has been taken below. Ra crosses the sky in a boat and goes down into the underworld each evening, while Helios threatens to go down to Hades if he is not given justice, in the descent to the underworld. Amaterasu hides in the cave and the world goes dark, which is what Helios threatened.