Helios is the Sun itself made a person: each dawn he mounts a blazing four-horse chariot, drives it up the vault of the sky, and sinks at evening into the streams of Oceanus, from which a golden cup carries him back around the earth to the east by night. Because nothing on earth is hidden from the daylight, he is invoked above all as a witness. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter it is Helios who alone saw Hades carry off Persephone and who tells the grieving mother what became of her daughter; in the Odyssey it is his sacred cattle on the island of Thrinacia, counted and never touched, whose slaughter by Odysseus's crew dooms them. To swear by Helios was to call the one god who could not be deceived.
Helios's standard attribute, a crown of sunburst rays, became one of antiquity's most durable images: when Frederic Auguste Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty in the 1870s, he drew on ancient descriptions of the Colossus of Rhodes, giving Liberty her own radiate crown of seven spikes, so that a nineteenth-century American monument to freedom carries, at one remove, the headgear of the Greek sun-god. The original Colossus itself, a roughly 33-metre bronze statue that stood only some 54 years before an earthquake toppled it around 226 BCE, was never straddled across the harbour entrance as later legend imagined, a popular embellishment with no support in the ancient sources describing its actual, more modest, dockside setting.