Helios

The god left out of the draw

The gods once shared out the earth among themselves by drawing lots. Helios, the sun, was away, and nobody set aside a share for him. Zeus offered to draw the lots again. But Helios had already seen something under the grey sea.

This story comes from the poet Pindar, in his seventh Olympian, a poem written for a winner at the Olympic Games. Helios asks the goddess Lachesis to swear that the land rising into the light will be his. Rhodes comes up out of the water and becomes his island. Helios joins with the island and has seven sons. From their family come Ialysos, Kameiros and Lindos, the names of the three ancient cities of Rhodes.

The story explains how the god who protected Rhodes could own the island even though he missed the first share-out. Helios sees everything. So he spots land that no other god has received yet, and he claims it before the second draw begins.

Is Hyperion the father or the sun?

The early Greek poet Hesiod makes Helios a son of two Titans, the older generation of gods, named Hyperion and Theia. His sisters are Selene and Eos. The Homeric Hymn to Helios, an early poem in praise of the god, agrees that Hyperion is his father. But it calls his mother Euryphaessa, which means “far-shining”. Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, also uses Hyperion as a title for Helios himself.

This shared name does not mean that father and son are one figure in every source. It shows how a name linked with height and light could pass between a Titan and the sun who comes after him. The old family trees place Helios among the descendants of the Titans. His daily course across the sky places him in the active world that Zeus rules.

What does an all-seeing god demand?

In the Iliad, the two armies at Troy call on Helios as a witness. They are agreeing a truce before Paris and Menelaus fight each other. Helios sees and hears everything under his path. That makes him a useful witness when an oath must reach further than the eyes of the people who swear it.

His sight also explains why his cattle on the island of Thrinacia are dangerous to touch. The crew of the hero Odysseus are warned to leave his seven herds of cattle and seven flocks of sheep alone. Each herd and flock holds 50 animals. They never breed and never die. Two daughters of Helios, Phaethousa and Lampetie, guard them.

Hunger wins over the warning. While Odysseus sleeps, his crew kill some of the cattle, and Lampetie tells her father. Helios demands that Zeus punish them. If Zeus refuses, Helios will take his light down to the underworld, the land of the dead. Zeus destroys the ship with a thunderbolt. The sun cannot undo the killing. But if he took his light away, gods and mortals would both suffer, so Zeus, the ruler of heaven, answers him.

How Rhodes made the claim civic

In 408 BC, the three cities of Ialysos, Lindos and Kameiros joined to form a new city of Rhodes. Helios became its patron, the god who protected the city. The priest who served him held the city’s chief public office for a year at a time. The image of Helios appeared on the coins of Rhodes. Sacrifices and a festival called the Halieia gave his claim to the island a fixed place in the city’s year.

Rhodes survived a siege in 305 to 304 BC. After it, the sculptor Chares of Lindos made the bronze Colossus of Helios, a giant statue of the god. The Roman writer Pliny gives its height as 70 cubits and says it took 12 years to build. An earthquake brought it down after 66 years. Later visitors still came to marvel at its size as it lay broken on the ground.

No surviving evidence places the Colossus astride the harbour entrance, the pose made familiar by later art. Even the site of the main sanctuary of Helios in the city, his holy precinct, is still uncertain. The ancient evidence leaves Rhodes with a fallen statue of great size, but without the harbour pose that shapes its modern image.