Helios
Alexander the Great as Helios
Marble, Roman copy after an Hellenistic original from 3rd to 2nd century BCE.
Musei Capitolini, Rome, Italy
Dimensions H. 58.3 cm
Credit line From the Vatican
Accession number MC 732
Location Palazzo Nuovo, first floor, Hall of the Dying Gaul
Photographer/Source Jastrow (2006)Helios is the personification of the sun in Greek mythology.
Helios was imagined as a handsome god 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.
As time passed, Helios was increasingly identified with the god of light, Apollo.
The equivalent of Helios in Roman mythology was Sol, specifically Sol Invictus.
In Late Antiquity a cult of Helios Megistos ("Great Helios") drew to the image of Helios a number of syncretic elements.
Dio Cassius, describing the visit of Tiridates to the emperor Nero in 63 CE, refers to his worshipping Mithras.
The earliest Mithraic monument showing Mithras slaying the bull is thought to be CIMRM 593. This is a depiction of Mithras killing the bull, found in Rome. There is no date, but the inscription tells us that it was dedicated by a certain Alcimus, steward of T. Claudius Livianus. Vermaseren and Gordon believe that this Livianus is a certain Livianus who was commander of the Praetorian guard in 101 CE, which would give an earliest date of 98-99 CE.
An altar or block from near SS. Pietro e Marcellino on the Esquiline in Rome was inscribed with a bilingual inscription by an Imperial freedman named T. Flavius Hyginus, probably between 80-100 CE. It is dedicated to Sol Invictus Mithras.
Scholarship on Mithras begins with Franz Cumont, who published a two volume collection of source texts and images of monuments in French in 1894-1900. Cumont's hypothesis, as the author summarizes it in the first 32 pages of his book, was that the Roman religion was "the Roman form of Mazdaism", the Persian state religion, disseminated from the East. Recent theories about how Zoroastrianism was during the past era makes some new form of Cumont's east-west transfer possible.
Mithraism reached the apogee of its popularity during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, spreading at an "astonishing" rate at the same period when Sol Invictus became part of the state cult.
The idea of a relationship between early Christianity and Mithraism is based on a remark in the 2nd century Christian writer Justin Martyr, who accused the Mithraists of diabolically imitating the Christian communion rite.