Note 111.1 — Chapter VI · The Deities as Nature-Powers.

But such general traits of resemblance in two developed polytheisms deceive no trained inquirer; and it would be childish to base a theory of borrowing on them. What is far more important are the marked differences in the nature-side of the Greek polytheism, as compared with the Sumerian-Babylonian. In the latter, the solar-element was very strong, though perhaps not so omnipresent as some Assyriologists assure us. On the contrary, in the proto-Hellenic system it was strikingly weak, so far as we can interpret the evidence. The earliest Hellenes certainly regarded the Sun as a personal animate being, though the word Helios did not necessarily connote for them an anthropomorphic god. But the insignificance of his figure in the Homeric poems agrees well with the facts of actual cult. As I have pointed out in the last volume of my Cults,111.1 it was only at Rhodes that Helios was a great personal god, appealing to the faith and affections of the people, revered as their ancestor and the author of their civilisation, and descending, we may believe, from the period of the Minoan culture111.2 with which Rhodes was closely associated in legend. And it appears from the evidence of legend and Minoan art that sun-worship was of some power in the pre-Hellenic Aegean civilisation. In the Mycenaean epoch he may have had power in Corinth, but his cult faded there in the historic age before that of Athena and Poseidon. The developed Hellene preferred the more personal deity, whose name did not so obviously suggest a special phenomenon of nature. And if he inherited or adopted certain solar personages, as some think he adopted a sun-god Ares from Thrace, he seems to have transformed them by some mental process so as to obliterate the traces of the original nature-perception.