Helios

Helios is the Sun itself made a person: each dawn he mounts a blazing four-horse chariot, drives it up the vault of the sky, and sinks at evening into the streams of Oceanus, from which a golden cup carries him back around the earth to the east by night. Because nothing on earth is hidden from the daylight, he is invoked above all as a witness. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter it is Helios who alone saw Hades carry off Persephone and who tells the grieving mother what became of her daughter; in the Odyssey it is his sacred cattle on the island of Thrinacia, counted and never touched, whose slaughter by Odysseus's crew dooms them. To swear by Helios was to call the one god who could not be deceived.

Helios's standard attribute, a crown of sunburst rays, became one of antiquity's most durable images: when Frederic Auguste Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty in the 1870s, he drew on ancient descriptions of the Colossus of Rhodes, giving Liberty her own radiate crown of seven spikes, so that a nineteenth-century American monument to freedom carries, at one remove, the headgear of the Greek sun-god. The original Colossus itself, a roughly 33-metre bronze statue that stood only some 54 years before an earthquake toppled it around 226 BCE, was never straddled across the harbour entrance as later legend imagined, a popular embellishment with no support in the ancient sources describing its actual, more modest, dockside setting.

Helios had few great cult centres in mainland Greece, where his worship stayed comparatively marginal, but on the island of Rhodes he was the chief god of the state, honoured with the athletic festival of the Halieia and with the vast bronze Colossus that stood at the harbour and was counted among the wonders of the ancient world. From the fifth century BCE onward Greek poets and thinkers increasingly identified him with Apollo, whose associations with light and prophecy drew the two together, and by the Roman period Sol and Phoebus Apollo were often treated as one. The distinction mattered to scholars of religion even in antiquity: Helios is the visible disc, older and more elemental, while Apollo is a fully personal Olympian onto whom his solar role was gradually grafted.

Rome's own solar cult reached its height centuries after Helios's heyday in Greece. In 274 CE the emperor Aurelian, drawing on Syrian sun-worship he had encountered while campaigning in the east, established Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, as an official state cult with its own temple and priesthood at Rome, and the god's festival, the Natalis Solis Invicti, fell on 25 December, the winter solstice by the Julian calendar then in use. Because this solar festival coincided so closely with the emerging Christian celebration of Christ's nativity, historians of religion generally treat the Roman sun cult as part of the cultural backdrop against which the 25 December date for Christmas later became fixed in the fourth century, though the exact relationship between the two dates remains debated among scholars.