We need not confine ourselves entirely to Graeco-Aryan. In the Old English
poem Phoenix (210 f.) the sun ‘performs its appointed task and woruld
geondwliteð, ‘surveys the world’. The Latvian Sun-goddess Saule is repre-
sented as seeing all that happens in different parts of the earth (LD 33830,
33901, 33991 = Jonval nos. 252–4). In a Scots Gaelic song to the Sun recorded
from old men in the Western Isles in the nineteenth century the luminary is
addressed as sùil Dhé mhóir, ‘eye of great God’, where sùil is (probably) the
same word as the MIE word for ‘sun’, and the name of God, though actually
from deiwós, here in effect covers the Sky-god Dyeus, one of whose oldest
epithets was ‘great’.^14
The analogy of sun and eye finds various expression in Indo-European
languages. Greek dramatists call the sun ‘eyelid of golden day’, ‘this holy eye
of the lamp’, ‘the tireless eye of the air’. In Ovid the Sun-god calls himself ‘the
eye of the world’. Macrobius says that ‘antiquity’ called the sun Iouis oculus.^15
Vedic poets refer to Su ̄ rya’s own eye, and Firdawsi too speaks of ‘the eye of the
sun’.^16 The Armenian aregakn‘sun’ means literally ‘eye of the sun’, a com-
pound of the genitive of arew‘sun’ with akn‘eye’.
Contrariwise, the human eye is sometimes seen as an analogue of the sun.
Euripides in Aristophanes’Thesmophoriazousai (13–18) propounds a cosmo-
gonic theory by which the divine Aither created living creatures, and to
endow them with sight contrived the eye in imitation of ‘the wheel of the
sun’. In the old Armenian mythological verses about the birth of the hero
Vahagn his eyes are described as ‘little suns’. In Norse skaldic verse ‘suns of
the forehead’ (ennis sólir) is a kenning for the eyes, and in Old Irish, as we
have seen, súil (feminine) is the word for ‘eye’.
Oaths by the SunThe Sun’s capacity for seeing everything that people do qualifies him as a
supervisor of justice, or at least gives him a valuable role as the god of justice’s
eye and as a trusty witness. His credentials are reinforced by his own strict
observance of cosmic law: dís ́ah
̇
Su ̄ ́ryo ná mina ̄ti prádis
̇t
̇a ̄h
̇, ‘Su ̄ rya does not
infringe the directions prescribed’ (RV 3. 30. 12), where dis ́- is cognate with
Greek δκη‘justice, right’ and Latin con-dicio. The verse might be converted
(^14) Carmichael (1928–59), iii. 306, quoted in full later in this chapter.
(^15) Soph. Ant. 103 χρυσα >μρα βλφαρον, 879 το ́ δε λαμπα ́ δο Tερ:ν Zμμα; Ar. Nub.
285 Zμμα α!θρο qκα ́ ματον; Ov. Met. 4. 228 mundi oculus; Macr. Sat. 1. 21. 12.
(^16) RV 1. 113. 9; 5. 59. 5; 7. 98. 6; 9. 10. 9; 10. 10. 9; Sha ̄h-na ̄ma, Levy (1967), 185. Savitr
̇
is
híran ̇ya ̄ks
̇
a- ‘golden-eyed’ (RV 1. 35. 8), much as Helios is χρυσωπο ́ (Eur. El. 740 with
Denniston’s commentary); cf. G. Costa, Archivio Glottologico Italiano 69 (1984), 35.
- Sun and Daughter 199