During the time when the slaughter of the oxen is effected, Ulysses is asleep: and it seems just possible that Homer may by this circumstance have meant to signify that it was night when the catastrophe occurred, which would save the dignity of this deity in respect to vision.
Is of the Olympian Court.
The Olympian rank of the Sun is clear; but there seem to be ascriptions made to him, which can only be reconciled by the supposition, in itself far from improbable, that he was separately known of, as an object of worship, through two different sets of traditions; one of them referable to Pelasgian sources, and entailing Trojan sympathies, the other of an Hellenic, or very probably a Phœnician, cast, and tending to rank him with the Hellenes. For in the Iliad his unwillingness to set, when his setting was to bring the glories of the Trojans to an end, seems very strongly to imply that he had a Pelasgian origin. In the Odyssey, his siding with Vulcan against Mars and Venus would show, so far as it goes, a Hellenizing turn; but what is more important is this, that, as the father of Circe and Æetes, of whom the latter bears the exclusively Phœnician epithet ὀλοόφρων, and the former has her abode close by his ἀντολαὶ, or point of rising, he is at once thrown into the Phœnician or the Persian connection. As the Sun-worship was so general in the East, it seems quite possible that it might come into Greece by more channels than one: and as the process of personification might in one set of traditions be more, and in another less complete, we may here find a possible clue to Homer’s reason for treating it differently in the two poems. Particularly as the poem where he is least personal, the Iliad, is also that where he is most Pelasgian: for we have found reason to ascribe to the Pelasgians less of lively and creative power in the realms of the imagination, than to the Hellenes, and to such races as had stronger affinities with them.
So distinct is the Sun from Apollo in the Odyssey, that they appear as separate dramatis personæ in the Lay of Demodocus. Yet there are some latent signs of sympathy between them. Apollo tends the oxen of Laomedon: the Sun delights, morning and evening, in his own oxen in Thrinacie. It is difficult to avoid supposing some kind of relation to be conveyed by Homer between the rays of the sun, and the arrows of Apollo in the Plague. The extension of his sympathies to both races is another sign of resemblance. Again, we have a promise from Eurylochus, one of the crew of Ulysses, to build a temple to the Sun upon his safe return to Ithaca[503]. Now we have seen that the only instances of temples, which we can certainly declare to be named in the poems, are temples either of Minerva or of Apollo. Thus this vow of Eurylochus looks like another anticipation of the subsequent absorption of the Sun into the person and deity of Apollo: and on the whole, we are left to infer that beginnings of that process may have been already visible. Homer, perhaps, did not care to advance it. At least, it does not appear to me that either he or his nation were friendly to the conception of mere elemental gods. Gods who preside over external nature he presents to us in abundance; but gods, who are the mere organs of external nature, are alien to the Greek genius as candidates for the higher posts, and are relegated to subordinate places in the system. Only Vulcan and Ceres really appear with him to bear decisively the stamp of this character: and both of them seem as if they were already in part detached from it, and developing in another direction. For in Vulcan the human faculty of skill already predominates over fire, and Ceres impersonates the vegetable product of Earth, and not the mere dead mass.
The connection of the Sun with Pelasgian traditions according to the Egyptian type is, I think, strongly signified by the legend of the oxen and sheep, in which he takes so much delight.
In the time of Homer he was, as it were, a probationer in the ἄγων of the Grecian gods. The main facts before us are simply these: first, his unformed separate state at that epoch; secondly, his absorption in Apollo. The lesson taught by both is the repugnance of the Greeks to mere Nature-worship. The signification of the second, in particular, appears to be this, that as Ἠέλιος could not stand alone, and needed to be absorbed, so he could find no place for his absorption so fitting as in that deity, of whom, as well as of the more venerable traditions that he represented, brightness was an inseparable and original characteristic.
His incorporation with Apollo.
In this view, the mythological absorption of the Sun in Apollo is a most striking trait of the ancient mythology: and it even recalls to mind that sublime representation of the Prophet, ‘The sun shall be no more thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory[504].’
Dionysus or Bacchus.
The Dionysus of Homer.