Helios

Helios, the Roman Sol, is the Sun itself, pictured as a radiant god who drives his blazing four-horse chariot across the heavens each day from east to west. The all-seeing eye of the world, he witnesses every deed and is called to testify to oaths; it was his cattle that Odysseus's men slew to their ruin.

The intelligible sun

Helios came to absorb the solar aspects of Apollo and, in the late empire, to be worshipped as a supreme deity. He is supremely important to the Platonist tradition because of Plato's Republic, where the Sun is the visible offspring and image of the Good — as the sun gives light and life to the things we see, so the Good gives truth and being to the things we know. Building on this, the emperor Julian composed his Hymn to King Helios, a full solar theology in which the visible sun is the image of a higher, intelligible Sun, and that in turn of the Good itself — three suns, in three worlds, one light descending.

Epithets

• Hyperion Ὑπερίων — who travels on high
• Panoptes Πανόπτης — the all-seeing
• Phaethon Φαέθων — the shining
• Elector Ἠλέκτωρ — the beaming
• Sol Lat. — his Roman name