A simile in the Iliad implies that Sirius shines brightest when he comes up
λελουμνο ,Ωκεανο4ο, ‘washed in Oceanus’ (5. 6). Another passage refers
to the ‘baths of Oceanus’ that most of the stars pass through (18. 489 =Od. 5.
275). That the Sun takes this bath is not explicitly mentioned. But at Od. 3. 1
he is said to rise from a beautiful λμνη (body of water, usually a lake or
lagoon), and a tragedian wrote of a Red Sea and an Aethiopian λμνη, ‘where
Helios the all-seeing ever relieves his immortal body and his horses’ fatigue
in warm springs of gentle water’.^58 The idea recurs in Baltic tradition. A
sixteenth-century investigator of Lithuanian beliefs recorded that ‘Perkuna
tete [Perkunas’ mother] is the mother of lightning and thunder; she bathes
the tired and dusty Sun and sends him out the next day clean and shining’. A
Latvian song has Mary heating the bathwater for ‘the orphan girls’, that is, the
stars, the children abandoned by the Sun and Moon after their separation.^59
The Sun’s cleansing bath is also a Slavonic motif.^60 The notion that the sun
actually plunges into the sea is presupposed in Posidonius’ report of a belief
that the Celts living by the western ocean, being closer to it, see it larger when
it sets and hear a hissing sound as its fire is put out. The audible sound has its
counterpart in the one heard at sunrise in the Baltic east according to the
report of Tacitus cited earlier.^61
CULTIC OBSERVANCEThe Sun is a god of regular habits, which he does not vary in response to
human intercession. He can inspire joy and admiration, but no real anxiety. It
is the moody gods, the ones liable to tantrums, the ones who rollick about
and do not know their own strength, who are greater promoters of religious
activity. When Helios in the Odyssey (12. 376–88) is outraged by the violation
of his cattle, he can threaten to go and operate in the lower instead of the
upper world, but he cannot send a storm upon the miscreants; he has to
persuade Zeus to do that for him.
(^58) [Aesch.] fr. 192. From later classical verse cf. Stat. Theb. 3. 407–14; Nonn. Dion. 12. 6–14.
(^59) J. Lasicius (Łasicki), De diis Samagitarum in Mannhardt (1936), 356, cf. 392 ‘was er von der
Perkuna tete erzählt, sieht ganz so aus, als sei es aus einer Daina oder einer Pasaka (Märchen)
geschöpft’; Usener (1896), 97; von Schroeder (1914–16), ii. 247; Mannhardt (1875), 76 no. 6,
303 f., 307.
(^60) Grimm (1883–8), 742 f.; von Schroeder (1914–16), ii. 245–7; Vánˇa (1992), 62.
(^61) Posid. fr. 16 Theiler ap. Strab. 3. 1. 5; Tac. Germ. 45. 1. I doubt if von Schroeder (1914–16),
ii. 9, is justified in connecting this with the ‘wake-up call’ (s ́lóka-) delivered by Savitr
̇
in RV 3. 54.
11; 4. 53. 3; 5. 82. 9; 7. 82. 10.
212 5. Sun and Daughter