elios, the god of the sun, was the son of The Titans, Hyperion, and Thea, and the brother of Selene, the goddess of the moon, and of Eos, the goddess of the dawn. He was described as rising in the morning in the east from Oceanus, as traversing the heavens in a chariot, and as sinking in the evening into the west. Many of the attributes of Helios, are those of Apollo, the sun god of the Olympian dynasty.

By Perseis, and ocean nymph, he was the father of Aetes, the king of Colchis; of Circe, the famous or infamous enchantress whom turned men into swine; and of Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, king of Crete, who fell in love with her husbands white bull.

By Clymene, another ocean nymph, he was the father of Phaethon, whose unskilful handling of his father's chariot cost him his life and almost set heaven and earth ablaze.

In love with Helios, was Clytie, whose love, however, was not returned. She wasted away watching him and was transferred into a flower, the heliotrope, and the very name meaning, "to turn towards the sun".

Helios was a god who sees and hears everything, and it was he that revealed the hiding place of Ares and Aphrodite to Hephaestus, and who told Demeter that Hades had kidnapped her daughter Persephone. The islands of Thrinacia (Sicily) and Rhodes were sacred to him. On the former, he had seven flocks of sheep and as many of oxen, fifty in each flock, of which he was tremendously proud. In his daily journey it was his great pride and pleasure to look down on his seven hundred animals, but his anger knew no bounds if the total number was increased or lessened. At Rhodes, a yearly festival, the Helia, was held in his honour, where four horses were thrown into the sea as a sacrifice. At Rhodes, a famous colossal bronze statue was erected to him. Helios had twelve room palaces - corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac - in which he lived in rotation during the course of the year.