Athenaeus adds that "Helios gained a portion of toil for all his days", as there is no rest for either him or his horses.
Although the chariot is usually said to be the work of Hephaestus, Hyginus states that it was Helios himself who built it. His chariot is described as golden, His sister Eos is said to have not only opened the gates for Helios, but would often accompany him as well. In the extreme east and west were said to be people who tended to his horses, for whom summer was perpetual and fruitful. as heaven and earth both trembling at the newborn goddess' sight.
In the Iliad, Hera who supports the Greeks, makes him set earlier than usual against his will during battle, and later still during the same war, after his sister Eos's son Memnon was killed, she made him downcast, causing his light to fade, so she could be able to freely steal her son's body undetected by the armies, as he consoled his sister in her grief over Memnon's death.
It was said that summer days are longer due to Helios often stopping his chariot mid-air to watch from above nymphs dancing during the summer, and sometimes he is late to rise because he lingers with his consort. If the other gods wish so, Helios can be hastened on his daily course when they wish it to be night.
thumb|left|240px|Helios's cup with Heracles in it, [[Rome, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, n. 205336.]]
When Zeus desired to sleep with Alcmene, he made one night last threefold, hiding the light of the Sun, by ordering Helios not to rise for those three days. Satirical author Lucian of Samosata dramatized this myth in one of his Dialogues of the Gods.
While Heracles was travelling to Erytheia to retrieve the cattle of Geryon for his tenth labour, he crossed the Libyan desert and was so frustrated at the heat that he shot an arrow at Helios, the Sun. Almost immediately, Heracles realized his mistake and apologized profusely (Pherecydes wrote that Heracles stretched his arrow at him menacingly, but Helios ordered him to stop, and Heracles in fear desisted
Solar eclipses
thumb|right|270px|Helios and Eos, carried by the morning dew, above them the god of heaven. Relief from the armor of the statue of Augustus in the Vatican, 1890.
Solar eclipses were phaenomena of fear as well as wonder in Ancient Greece, and were seen as the Sun abandoning humanity. According to a fragment of Archilochus, it is Zeus who blocks Helios and makes him disappear from the sky. In one of his paeans, the lyric poet Pindar describes a solar eclipse as the Sun's light being hidden from the world, a bad omen of destruction and doom:
Horses of Helios
thumb|upright=1.3|The Horses of Helios, Westminster, London.Some lists, cited by Hyginus, of the names of horses that pulled Helios's chariot, are as follows. Scholarship acknowledges that, despite differences between the lists, the names of the horses always seem to refer to fire, flame, light and other luminous qualities.
- According to Eumelus of Corinth – late 7th/ early 6th century BC: The male trace horses are Eous (by him the sky is turned) and Aethiops (as if flaming, parches the grain) and the female yoke-bearers are Bronte ("Thunder") and Sterope ("Lightning").
- According to Ovid — Roman, 1st century BC Phaethon's ride: Pyrois ("the fiery one"), Eous ("he of the dawn"), Aethon ("blazing"), and Phlegon ("burning").
Hyginus writes that according to Homer, the horses' names are Abraxas and Therbeeo; but Homer makes no mention of horses or chariot.
Awarding of Rhodes
thumb|left|300px|Silver [[tetradrachm of Rhodes showing Helios and a rose (205-190 BC, 13.48 g)]]
According to Pindar, when the gods divided the earth among them, Helios was absent, and thus he got no lot of land. He complained to Zeus about it, who offered to do the division of portions again, but Helios refused the offer, for he had seen a new land emerging from the deep of the sea; a rich, productive land for humans and good for cattle too. Helios asked for this island to be given to him, and Zeus agreed to it, with Lachesis (one of the three Fates) raising her hands to confirm the oath. Alternatively in another tradition, it was Helios himself who made the island rise from the sea when he caused the water which had overflowed it to disappear. He named it Rhodes, after his lover Rhode (the daughter of Poseidon and Aphrodite or Amphitrite), and it became the god's sacred island, where he was honoured above all other gods. With Rhode Helios sired seven sons, known as the Heliadae ("sons of the Sun"), who became the first rulers of the island, as well as one daughter, Electryone.
Phaethon
thumb|left|upright=1.3|Clymene urges Phaethon to find his father, 1589 engraving by [[Hendrik Goltzius.]]
The most well known story about Helios is the one involving his son Phaethon, who asked him to drive his chariot for a single day. Although all versions agree that Phaethon eventually got to drive Helios's chariot, and that he failed in his task with disastrous results, there are a great number of details that vary by version, including the identity of Phaethon's mother, the location the story takes place, the role Phaethon's sisters the Heliades play, the motivation behind Phaethon's decision to ask his father Helios for such thing, and even the exact relation between the god and the mortals involved.
Traditionally, Phaethon was Helios's son by the Oceanid nymph Clymene, or alternatively Rhode or the otherwise unknown Prote. In one version of the story, Phaethon is Helios's grandson, rather than son, through the boy's father Clymenus. In this version, Phaethon's mother is an Oceanid nymph named Merope.
In Euripides's lost play Phaethon, surviving only in twelve fragments, Phaethon is the product of an illicit liaison between his mother Clymene (who is now married to Merops, the king of Aethiopia) and Helios, though she claimed that her lawful husband was the father of her all her children. Clymene reveals the truth to her son, and urges him to travel east to get confirmation from his father after she informs him that Helios promised to grant their child any wish when he slept with her. Although reluctant at first, Phaethon is convinced and sets on to find his birth father. In a surviving fragment from the play, Helios accompanies his son in his ill-fated journey in the skies, trying to give him instructions on how to drive the chariot while he rides on a spare horse named Sirius,
If this messenger did witness the flight himself, it is possible there was also a passage where he described Helios taking control over the bolting horses in the same manner as Lucretius described. Phaethon inevitably dies; a fragment near the end of the play has Clymene order the slave girls hide Phaethon's still-smouldering body from Merops, and laments Helios's role in her son's death, saying he destroyed him and her both. A number of deities have been proposed for the identity of this possible deus ex machina, with Helios among them.
Nonnus of Panopolis presented a slightly different version of the myth, narrated by Hermes; according to him, Helios met and fell in love with Clymene, the daughter of the Ocean, and the two soon got married with her father's blessing. When he grows up, fascinated with his father's job, he asks him to drive his chariot for a single day. Helios does his best to dissuade him, arguing that sons are not necessarily fit to step into their fathers' shoes. But under pressure of Phaethon and Clymene's begging both, he eventually gives in. As per all other versions of the myth, Phaethon's ride is catastrophic and ends in his death.
thumb|upright=1.3|right|Phaethon in the chariot of the Sun, Godfried Maes, ca 1664-1700
Hyginus wrote that Phaethon secretly mounted his father's car without said father's knowledge and leave, but with the aid of his sisters the Heliades who yoked the horses.
In all retellings, Helios recovers the reins in time, thus saving the earth. Another consistent detail across versions are that Phaethon's sisters the Heliades mourn him by the Eridanus and are turned into black poplar trees, who shed tears of amber. According to Quintus Smyrnaeus, it was Helios who turned them into trees, for their honour to Phaethon. In one version of the myth, Helios conveyed his dead son to the stars, as a constellation (the Auriga).
The Watchman
Persephone
thumb|left|Head of Helios, middle period, [[Archaeological Museum of Rhodes]]
Helios is said to have seen and stood witness to everything that happened where his light shone. When Hades abducts Persephone, Helios is the only one to witness it.
In Ovid's Fasti, Demeter asks the stars first about Persephone's whereabouts, and it is Helice who advises her to go ask Helios. Demeter is not slow to approach him, and Helios then tells her not to waste time, and seek out for "the queen of the third world".
Ares and Aphrodite
thumb|upright=1.5|Vulcan surprises Venus and Mars, by [[Johann Heiss (1679)]]
In another myth, Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, but she cheated on him with his brother Ares, god of war. In Book Eight of the Odyssey, the blind singer Demodocus describes how the illicit lovers committed adultery, until one day Helios caught them in the act, and immediately informed Aphrodite's husband Hephaestus. Upon learning that, Hephaestus forged a net so thin it could hardly be seen, in order to ensnare them. He then announced that he was leaving for Lemnos. Upon hearing that, Ares went to Aphrodite and the two lovers coupled. Once again Helios informed Hephaestus, who came into the room and trapped them in the net. He then called the other gods to witness the humiliating sight.
Much later versions add a young man to the story, a warrior named Alectryon, tasked by Ares to stand guard should anyone approach. But Alectryon fell asleep, allowing Helios to discover the two lovers and inform Hephaestus. For this, Aphrodite hated Helios and his race for all time. In some versions, she cursed his daughter Pasiphaë to fall in love with the Cretan Bull as revenge against him. Pasiphaë's daughter Phaedra's passion for her step-son Hippolytus was also said to have been inflicted on her by Aphrodite for this same reason. This myth, it has been theorized, might have been used to explain the use of frankincense aromatic resin in Helios's worship. Leucothoe being buried alive as punishment by a male guardian, which is not too unlike Antigone's own fate, may also indicate an ancient tradition involving human sacrifice in a vegetation cult. At first the stories of Leucothoe and Clytie might have been two distinct myths concerning Helios which were later combined along with a third story, that of Helios discovering Ares and Aphrodite's affair and then informing Hephaestus, into a single tale either by Ovid himself or his source.
Other
In Sophocles's play Ajax, Ajax the Great, minutes before committing suicide, calls upon Helios to stop his golden reins when he reaches Ajax's native land of Salamis and inform his aging father Telamon and his mother of their son's fate and death, and salutes him one last time before he kills himself.
Involvement in wars
thumb|250px|left|Helios from the Silahtarağa Statuary Group depicting the Gigantomachy, 2nd century AD, [[Archaeological Museum of Istanbul.]]
Helios sides with the other gods in several battles. Surviving fragments from Titanomachy imply scenes where Helios is the only one among the Titans to have abstained from attacking the Olympian gods, and they, after the war was over, gave him a place in the sky and awarded him with his chariot.
He also takes part in the Giant wars; it was said by Pseudo-Apollodorus that during the battle of the Giants against the gods, the giant Alcyoneus stole Helios's cattle from Erytheia where the god kept them, or alternatively, that it was Alcyoneus's very theft of the cattle that started the war. Because the earth goddess Gaia, mother and ally of the Giants, learned of the prophecy that the giants would perish at the hand of a mortal, she sought to find a magical herb that would protect them and render them practically indestructible; thus Zeus ordered Helios, as well as his sisters Selene (Moon) and Eos (Dawn) not to shine, and harvested all of the plant for himself, denying Gaia the opportunity to make the Giants immortal, while Athena summoned the mortal Heracles to fight by their side.
thumb|upright=1.5|Helios on his chariot fighting a Giant, detail of the Gigantomachy frieze, [[Pergamon Altar, Pergamon museum, Berlin]]
At some point during the battle of gods and giants in Phlegra, Helios takes up an exhausted Hephaestus on his chariot. After the war ends, one of the giants, Picolous, flees to Aeaea, where Helios's daughter, Circe, lived. He attempted to chase Circe away from the island, only to be killed by Helios. From the blood of the slain giant that dripped on the earth a new plant was sprang, the herb moly, named thus from the battle ("malos" in Ancient Greek).
Helios is depicted in the Pergamon Altar, waging war against Giants next to Eos, Selene, and Theia in the southern frieze.
thumb|right|250px|Phoebus and Boreas, [[Jean-Baptiste Oudry's cosmic interpretation of La Fontaine's fable, 1729/34]]
Clashes and punishments
Gods
A myth about the origin of Corinth goes as such: Helios and Poseidon clashed as to who would get to have the city. The Hecatoncheir Briareos was tasked to settle the dispute between the two gods; he awarded the Acrocorinth to Helios, while Poseidon was given the isthmus of Corinth.
Aelian wrote that Nerites was the son of the sea god Nereus and the Oceanid Doris. In the version where Nerites became the lover of Poseidon, it is said that Helios turned him into a shellfish, for reasons unknown. At first Aelian writes that Helios was resentful of the boy's speed, but when trying to explain why he changed his form, he suggests that perhaps Poseidon and Helios were rivals in love.
In an Aesop fable, Helios and the north wind god Boreas argued about which one between them was the strongest god. They agreed that whoever was able to make a passing traveller remove his cloak would be declared the winner. Boreas was the one to try his luck first; but no matter how hard he blew, he could not remove the man's cloak, instead making him wrap his cloak around him even tighter. Helios shone bright then, and the traveller, overcome with the heat, removed his cloak, giving him the victory. The moral is that persuasion is better than force.
Mortals
thumb|left|upright=1.4|Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, by [[Nicolas Poussin, 1658, oil on canvas]]Relating to his nature as the Sun, Helios was presented as a god who could restore and deprive people of vision, as it was regarded that his light that made the faculty of sight and enabled visible things to be seen. In one myth, after Orion was blinded by King Oenopion, he traveled to the east, where he met Helios. Helios then healed Orion's eyes, restoring his eyesight.
In Phineus's story, his blinding, as reported in Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica, was Zeus's punishment for Phineus revealing the future to mankind. According, however, to one of the alternative versions, it was Helios who had deprived Phineus of his sight. Pseudo-Oppian wrote that Helios's wrath was due to some obscure victory of the prophet; after Calais and Zetes slew the Harpies tormenting Phineus, Helios then turned him into a mole, a blind creature. In yet another version, he blinded Phineus at the request of his son Aeëtes.thumb|230px|The Fall of Icarus, ancient fresco from Pompeii, ca 40-79 AD
In another tale, the Athenian inventor Daedalus and his young son Icarus fashioned themselves wings made of birds' feathers glued together with wax and flew away. According to scholia on Euripides, Icarus, being young and rashful, thought himself greater than Helios. Angered, Helios hurled his rays at him, melting the wax and plunging Icarus into the sea to drown. Later, it was Helios who decreed that said sea would be named after the unfortunate youth, the Icarian Sea.
Arge was a huntress who, while hunting down a particularly fast stag, claimed that fast as the Sun as it was, she would eventually catch up to it. Helios, offended by the girl's words, changed her shape into that of a doe.
In one rare version of Smyrna's tale, it was an angry Helios who cursed her to fall in love with her own father Cinyras because of some unspecified offence the girl committed against him; in the vast majority of other versions however, the culprit behind Smyrna's curse is the goddess of love Aphrodite.
Oxen of the Sun
thumb|right|upright=1.5|Helios and chariot depicted on the dome of the entrance hall of the [[Széchenyi Bath, Budapest]]
Helios is said to have kept his sheep and cattle on his sacred island of Thrinacia, or in some cases Erytheia. Each flock numbers fifty beasts, totaling 350 cows and 350 sheep—the number of days of the year in the early Ancient Greek calendar; the seven herds correspond to the week, containing seven days. The cows did not breed or die. In the Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes, after Hermes has been brought before Zeus by an angry Apollo for stealing Apollo's sacred cows, the young god excuses himself for his actions and says to his father that "I reverence Helios greatly and the other gods".
Augeas, who in some versions is his son, safe-keeps a herd of twelve bulls sacred to the god. Moreover, it was said that Augeas's enormous herd of cattle was a gift to him by his father.
Apollonia in Illyria was another place where he kept a flock of his sheep; a man named Peithenius had been put in charge of them, but the sheep were devoured by wolves. The other Apolloniates, thinking he had been neglectful, gouged out Peithenius's eyes. Angered over the man's treatment, Helios made the earth grow barren and ceased to bear fruit; the earth grew fruitful again only after the Apolloniates had propitiated Peithenius by craft, and by two suburbs and a house he picked out, pleasing the god. This story is also attested by Greek historian Herodotus, who calls the man Evenius.
Odyssey
thumb|upright=1.2|left|The companions of Odysseus rob the cattle of Helios, fresco by Palazzo Poggi, 1556.
During Odysseus's journey to get back home, he arrives at the island of Circe, who warns him not to touch Helios's sacred cows once he reaches Thrinacia, or the god would keep them from returning home. Though Odysseus warns his men, when supplies run short they kill and eat some of the cattle. The guardians of the island, Helios's daughters Phaethusa and Lampetia, tell their father about this. Helios then appeals to Zeus telling him to dispose of Odysseus's men, rejecting the crewmen's compensation of a new temple in Ithaca. Zeus destroys the ship with his lightning bolt, killing all the men except for Odysseus.
Other works
thumb|240px|right|Bust of Helios in a clipeus, detail from a strigillated lenos [[sarcophagus, white marble, early 3rd century CE, Tomb D in Via Belluzzo, Rome.]]
Helios is featured in several of Lucian's works beyond his Dialogues of the Gods. In another work of Lucian's, ', Selene complains to the titular character about philosophers wanting to stir up strife between herself and Helios. Later he is seen feasting with the other gods on Olympus, and prompting Menippus to wonder how can night fall on the Heavens while he is there.
thumb|left|The music of the spheres: the planetary spheres, among others, on an engraving from Renaissance Italy.
Diodorus Siculus recorded an unorthodox version of the myth, in which Basileia, who had succeeded her father Uranus to his royal throne, married her brother Hyperion, and had two children, a son Helios and a daughter Selene. Because Basileia's other brothers envied these offspring, they put Hyperion to the sword and drowned Helios in the river Eridanus, while Selene took her own life. After the massacre, Helios appeared in a dream to his grieving mother and assured her and their murderers would be punished, and that he and his sister would now be transformed into immortal, divine natures; what was known as Mene would now be called Selene, and the "holy fire" in the heavens would bear his own name.
It was said that Selene, when preoccupied with her passion for the mortal Endymion, would give her moon chariot to Helios to drive it.
Claudian wrote that in his infancy, Helios was nursed by his aunt Tethys.
Pausanias writes that the people of Titane held that Titan was a brother of Helios, the first inhabitant of Titane after whom the town was named; Titan however was generally identified as Helios himself, instead of being a separate figure.
According to sixth century BC lyric poet Stesichorus, with Helios in his palace lives his mother Theia.
In the myth of the dragon Python's slaying by Apollo, the slain serpent's corpse is said to have rotten in the strength of the "shining Hyperion".
Consorts and children
thumb|upright=1.2|Helios, riding on a snake-drawn chariot, witnesses Medea killing her son on an altar, red-figure krater, detail, attributed to the [[Underworld Painter, circa 330 - 310 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlung, Munich.]]
The god Helios is typically depicted as the head of a large family, and the places that venerated him the most would also typically claim both mythological and genealogical descent from him;
thumb|upright=1.25|left|Limestone relief representing the god Helios, driving the celestial quadriga, [[Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, Belgium.]]
Traditionally the Oceanid nymph Perse was seen as the sun god's wife by whom he had various children, most notably Circe, Aeëtes, Minos's wife Pasiphaë, Perses, and in some versions the Corinthian king Aloeus. Ioannes Tzetzes adds Calypso, otherwise the daughter of Atlas, to the list of children Helios had by Perse, perhaps due to the similarities of the roles and personalities she and Circe display in the Odyssey as hosts of Odysseus.
thumb|right|240px|Helios rising in his quadriga; above Nyx driving away to the left and Eos to the right, and Heracles offering sacrifice at altar. Sappho painter, Greek, Attic, black-figure, ca. 500 BC
At some point Helios warned Aeëtes of a prophecy that stated he would suffer treachery from one of his own offspring (which Aeëtes took to mean his daughter Chalciope and her children by Phrixus). Helios also bestowed several gifts on his son, such as a chariot with swift steeds, a golden helmet with four plates, a giant's war armor, and robes and a necklace as a pledge of fatherhood. When his daughter Medea betrays him and flees with Jason after stealing the golden fleece, Aeëtes calls upon his father and Zeus to witness their unlawful actions against him and his people.
As father of Aeëtes, Helios was also the grandfather of Medea and would play a significant role in Euripides's rendition of her fate in Corinth. When Medea offers Princess Glauce the poisoned robes and diadem, she says they were gifts to her from Helios. Later, after Medea has caused the deaths of Glauce and King Creon, as well as her own children, Helios helps her escape Corinth and her husband. In Seneca's rendition of the story, a frustrated Medea criticizes the inaction of her grandfather, wondering why he has not darkened the sky at sight of such wickedness, and asks from him his fiery chariot so she can burn Corinth to the ground.
However, he is also stated to have married other women instead like Rhodos in the Rhodian tradition, by whom he had seven sons, the Heliadae (Ochimus, Cercaphus, Macar, Actis, Tenages, Triopas, Candalus), and the girl Electryone.
In Nonnus's account from the Dionysiaca, Helios and the nymph Clymene met and fell in love with each other in the mythical island of Kerne and got married. Soon Clymene fell pregnant with Phaetheon. Her and Helios raised their child together, until the ill-fated day the boy asked his father for his chariot. A passage from Greek anthology mentions Helios visiting Clymene in her room.
The mortal king of Elis Augeas was said to be Helios's son, but Pausanias states that his actual father was the mortal king Eleios.
In some rare versions, Helios is the father, rather than the brother, of his sisters Selene and Eos. A scholiast on Euripides explained that Selene was said to be his daughter since she partakes of the solar light, and changes her shape based on the position of the sun.
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Consort
! Children
| rowspan="27;" |
! Consort
! Children
| rowspan="27;" |
! Consort
! Children
|-
| Athena
| • The Corybantes
| rowspan="11" | Rhodos<br />
| • The Heliadae
| Ephyra<br />
| • Aeëtes
|-
| rowspan="4" | Aegle,<br />
| • The Charites
| 1. Tenages
| rowspan="2" |Antiope
| • Aeëtes
|-
| 1. Aglaea<br />
| 2. Macareus
| • Aloeus
|-
| 2. Euphrosyne<br />
| 3. Actis
| rowspan="3" | Gaia
| • Tritopatores
|-
| 3. Thalia<br />
| 4. Triopas
| • Bisaltes
|-
| rowspan="9" | Clymene<br />
| • The Heliades
| 5. Candalus
| • Achelous
|-
| 1. Aetheria
| 6. Ochimus
| Hyrmine or
| rowspan="3" | • Augeas
|-
| 2. Helia
| 7. Cercaphus
| Iphiboe
|-
| 4. Phoebe
| 9. Thrinax
| Demeter or
| rowspan="2" | • Acheron
|-
| 5. Dioxippe
| • Electryone
| Gaia
|-
| • Phaethon
| rowspan="6" | Perse<br />
| • Calypso
|
| • Aethon
|-
| • Astris
| • Aeëtes
|
| • Aix
|-
| • Lampetia
| • Perses
|
| • Aloeus
|-
| Rhode<br />