Helios. Helios, also Helius, in Ancient Greek religion and myth, is the god and personification of the Sun, often depicted in art with a radiant crown and driving a horse-drawn chariot through the sky. Though Helios was a relatively minor deity in Classical Greece, his worship grew more prominent in late antiquity thanks to his identification with several major solar divinities of the Roman period, particularly Apollo and Sol. The Roman Emperor Julian made Helios the central divinity of his short-lived revival of traditional Roman religious practices in the 4th century AD. Helios figures prominently in several works of Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, in which he is often described as the son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, and brother of the goddesses Selene and Eos. The name Helen is thought to share this etymology, and may express an early alternate personification of the sun among Hellenic peoples. The female offspring of Helios were called Heliades. The Greek sun god had various bynames or epithets, which over time in some cases came to be considered separate deities associated with the Sun. Among these is Hyperion, Elektor, Phaeton the radiant, Terpsimbrotos, and Hekatos. Helios is usually depicted as a handsome young man crowned with the shining aureole of the Sun, who drove the chariot of the Sun across the sky each day to Earth-circling Oceanus and through the world-ocean returned to the East at night. In the Homeric Hymn to Helios, Helios is said to drive a golden chariot drawn by steeds; and Pindar speaks of Helios's fire-darting steeds. Still later, the horses were given fire related names: Pyrois, Aeos, Aethon, and Phlegon. The imagery surrounding a chariot-driving solar deity is likely Indo-European in origin, and is common to both early Greek and Near Eastern religions. The earliest artistic representations of the chariot god come from the Parthian period in Persia, where there is evidence of rituals being performed for the sun god by Magi, indicating an assimilation of the worship of Helios and Mithras. Helios is seen as both a personification of the Sun and the fundamental creative power behind it, and as a result is often worshiped as a god of life and creation. Homer described Helios as a god who gives joy to mortals, and other ancient texts give him the epithet gracious, given that he is the source of life and regeneration, and associated with the creation of the world. One passage recorded in the Greek Magical Papyri says of Helios, the earth flourished when you shone forth and made the plants fruitful when you laughed, and brought to life the living creatures when you permitted. L. R. Farnell assumed that sun-worship had once been prevalent and powerful among the people of the pre-Hellenic culture, but that very few of the communities of the later historic period retained it as a potent factor of the state religion. The largely Attic literary sources used by scholars present ancient Greek religion with an Athenian bias, and, according to J. Burnet, no Athenian could be expected to worship Helios or Selene, but he might think them to be gods, since Helios was the great god of Rhodes and Selene was worshiped at Elis and elsewhere. James A. Notopoulos considered Burnet's distinction to be artificial: To believe in the existence of the gods involves acknowledgment through worship, as Laws 87 D, E shows. Aristophanes' Peace contrasts the worship of Helios and Selene with that of the more essentially Greek Twelve Olympians, as the representative gods of the Achaemenid Persians; all the evidence shows that Helios and Selene were minor gods to the Greeks. The island of Rhodes was an important cult center for Helios, one of the only places where he was worshipped as a major deity in ancient Greece. The worship of Helios at Rhodes included a ritual in which a quadriga, or chariot drawn by four horses, was driven over a precipice into the sea, in reenactment to the myth of Phaethon. Annual gymnastic tournaments were held in Helios' honor. The Colossus of Rhodes was dedicated to him. Helios also had a significant cult on the acropolis of Corinth on the Greek mainland. The Dorians also seem to have revered Helios, and to have hosted His primary cult on the mainland.