It's All Geek to Me:
tales of the Greek Gods by Leah Samul
Yule 89: Helios
Sometimes spelled as Helius. His family connections are a matter of dispute. He is the son of Hyperion and Thea and the brother of Selene and Eos, according to Hesiod. The Homeric Hymn to the Sun lists Hyperion as his father and Euryphaessa as his mother. According to Hesiod, he is the father with Perseis of Circe and Aeetes. According to Apollodorus, his child by Perseis is Pasiphae. And Ovid says that with Clymene, Helios' children are Phaethon, Lampetia and Phaethusa. Tripp says that Lampetia and Phaethusa were his daughters by the nymph Neaera.
Sources conflict as to exactly how Helios was seen by the Greeks. Apollo was associated with the light of the sun. Whether Helios, separate from Apollo, was universally seen as the personification of the sun is not clear. Stapleton says that "there was a tendency, in historical times, to identify Helios with Apollo, but the sun, as a cult in the ancient world, did not receive wide acceptance until the late Roman empire when, as Sol Invictus, he became in many ways its principal God." Schwab says that Helios is one of the names of Apollo, but Larousse says that the sun itself "was represented by a special divinity, Helios." Burkert feels that Apollo and Helios were consciously equated. In the English translation of Hesiod's Theogony, Helios is called "the great Sun-God." To make matters even more confusing, his father Hyperion was also considered a sun God.
According to Pindar, Helios was not present when the world was divided up. When he returned, Zeus offered to cast lots again, but Helios didn't think that was necessary and simply asked for the island of Rhodes. The statue called the Colossus of Rhodes was actually a statue of him, and it stood in the harbor. The island was sacred to Helios and he became its patron. He mated with Rhodes (it is unclear whether this is a nymph or the island itself) and had seven sons who were endowed "with the shrewdest wits of the men of old time."
As the sun, Helios saw everything that happened on the earth. In the Homeric Hymn he is described as riding the chariot drawn by stallions across the sky and into the ocean. He therefore saw the abduction of Persephone by Hades (as did Hecate), and when Demeter came to ask him if he had seen her daughter he told her what had happened. He also witnessed and then reported to Hephaestus the love affair that his wife Aphrodite was having with Ares. Helios fell in love with Leucothoe, disguising himself as her mother so that he could get into her bedroom. This scandalous love affair was reported to Leucothoe's father King Orchamus by a nymph named Clytie, who was a former sweetheart of Helios and was jealous. The king punished his daughter by burying her alive, and Helios was unable to revive her. He then anointed her body and turned her into the tree that yields frankincense, which was a much-valued incense during ancient times. Clytie eventually was transformed into the plant called heliotrope, because its stem, leaves and flower turn toward the light of the sun and follow its motion across the sky during the day.
Helios figures in the myths of two of Greece's most famous heroes: Odysseus and Heracles. Odysseus had been told by both Circe and Tiresias to avoid the island of the Sun god, who is referred to in the Odyssey as both Hyperion and Helios. But Odysseus' men talked him into landing there. They were becalmed there because the wind was blowing from the wrong direction, and one day while Odysseus had left them and fallen asleep, they went back on their sworn word and killed some of the cattle that belonged to Helios. Discovering this, his daughter Lampetia told her father about it. Helios threatened to shine in Hades and bring back the dead, and so Zeus was obliged to punish the offenders by causing them to be shipwrecked in a storm. The only one to survive was Odysseus.
Heracles had an encounter with Helios while working on his tenth labor, which was to seize the cattle of Geryon. On his way there he got tired of the heat of the sun and, taking out his bow, he aimed it at the sun. Helios admired his daring and rewarded him by giving him a golden cup as a boat.
[Editor's Note: Many of you who read information about the Greek Gods and Goddesses might notice that the ancient sources seem to be in conflict with each other, and wonder why the ancient writers couldn't have kept things straight when it came to their own religion. You then might be tempted to feel, as I did for a long time, that the Greeks were very confused about their Gods, Goddesses and mythological figures. Recall, when you are tempted to become impatient about all this conflicting information, that there is no such thing as a simple religious tradition; all religious tradition is as complex as the human experience that gives it form. And we humans are nothing if not multi-faceted and complex! If you asked a Catholic and a Lutheran to talk about their respective religions, you would get a very different view of Christianity. For one thing, the Lutheran wouldn't give any credence to the huge number of saints that the Catholic prays to: the Catholic thinks saints are specially consecrated and holy spirits, and the Lutheran thinks saints are a lot of bunk. An ancient Greek transported to this century and faced with all the different sects of Christianity, or even Judaism or Buddhism, might think that we're the ones who are confused about our divinities!]
(Sources: Hesiod lines 371-2 and 956-7; Apollodorus, 3.1.2; Pindar, Olympia 7, lines 55-76; Hymn #1 to Demeter; Odyssey Book 8, lines 267-71; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 4, lines 204-271; Schwab, p.747; Stapleton p.124; Burkert, p. 120 and 336; Larousse, p. 113)