Apollo. Cornutus, writing about Greek mythology in the
first century BCE, says that the sun is Apollo and the moon
is his sister Artemis. In Roman times, after the names of the
Greek gods reached Italy, this identification was taken for
granted. The first Roman emperor, Augustus, favored the
worship of Apollo, built a temple to him on the Palatine, and
had the poet Horace, in his secular hymns, speak of the sun
as Apollo and the moon as Diana (identified often with
Greek Artemis).
As the intellectual life of philosophy developed, the
Olympians lost their appeal. Philosophers substituted for
them the “visible gods,” the fixed heavenly bodies. In Plato’s
Laws (10.3) Socrates prays to the rising sun. Star lore from
Mesopotamia combined with Greek mathematics to produce
astrology, which gave impetus to the tendency to believe that
the heavens had a meaningful relationship with humans.
Many philosophers opposed astrology, but the Stoics em-
braced it as an example of the pantheism they advocated. The
sun was obviously the most important of the planets, and in
the growing mysticism of the Roman era became the final
destination of souls freed from the wheel of fate.
ANCIENT ROME. As in Greece, sun festivals are rare in an-
cient Rome, but there are indications of the early worship
of Sol Indiges, that is, an original and native god. There was
a public sacrifice to this god on the Quirinal on the ninth
of August. Varro’s book on agriculture (first century BCE)
says he will mention not the city gods but those who are the
best guides of the farmer, the sun and moon, “whose seasons
are observed at seedtime and harvest.” Varro believed that
the Sabine king Tatius, a contemporary of the founder Rom-
ulus, brought to Rome the worship of the sun and moon.
He also stated that the ancient family of the Aurelii (whose
descendants founded the cult of Sol Invictus) came from the
Sabine country and that their name was originally Ausel, the
Sabine word for “sun.”
The sun and moon were deities of the chariot races. It
is possible that the famous “October horse” ritual, held on
the ides of October, was originally a sacrifice to the sun. This
ritual involved a sacrifice of the outside winning horse; a sim-
ilar ritual occurred in March, and thus these rituals marked
the planting and the harvest seasons. The Sun had a temple
on the Aventine near the Circus, from which spectators
could watch the races. The Sun’s image in gold was on the
roof, since it was not proper to display the Sun indoors. It
was to that temple that offerings were made when a conspira-
cy against Nero was revealed, since the Sun had discovered
the plot (Tacitus, Annals 15.74). Augustus, returning from
the conquest of Egypt, brought with him two obelisks with
inscriptions declaring that he dedicated them to the sun, one
of which he set up in the Campus Martius and the other in
the Circus. They are now in the Piazza di Monte Citorio and
the Piazza del Popolo.
Under the empire, various forms of sun worship spread
into Rome from the East, imported both by slaves and by
the Roman legions. The cult and mysteries of Mithra were
the most widespread of these, apparently first taken up by
soldiers of Pompey from Cilician pirates. The cult was obvi-
ously derived from the older Iranian cult, but from the two
intervening centuries that separate these cults little is known
about Mithra; the cult spread, however, to all areas of the
empire. It involved initiation in a simulated cave; immortali-
ty was promised to initiates as a reward for the soldierly qual-
ities of courage and discipline. Some astral features were col-
lected along the way, and the degrees of initiation were
known by the names of the planets. Mithra, who was said
to be a special comrade or son of the sun, was born from a
rock and sacrificed a bull, from which all creation sprang.
After his deeds on earth were accomplished, he partook of
a special love feast with the sun god before being carried up
to heaven in a fiery chariot. The initiates imitated the love
feasts in mithraea, underground shrines, which can still be
found wherever the legions went. In death they were to be
carried to the sun in Mithra’s chariot. It became traditional
for steles of the emperor to depict this journey upward in the
sun’s chariot.One of the more lurid incidents in the late Roman em-
pire involved the short reign of a young man who called him-
self Elagabalus, or Heliogabalus, after his god. A relative of
Septimius Severus (r. 193–211 CE) on his Syrian wife’s side,
the youth was the hereditary priest of a sun god who was
worshiped at Emesa in Syria in the shape of a black meteor-
ite. After the death of Severus and his son Caracalla, the la-
dies of the court contrived to have the youth named emper-
or, though he was then only fourteen years old. He brought
his black stone to Rome and built for it a magnificent temple
on the Palatine. In front of his temple every day the youth
burned incense, poured wine, offered bloody sacrifices,
and—most difficult for the Romans to accept—danced Ori-
ental dances. According to the time-honored fate of unsuit-
able emperors, the young man was assassinated after four
years of rule.
The final victory at Rome of the sun god came about
through the emperor Aurelian, who in 270 CE assumed the
task of reconquering those parts of the empire that had de-
fected. Aurelian’s mother is said to have been a priestess of
the Sun in the village in which he was born, from the old
Sabine family of the Aurelii. The time was ripe for a new su-
preme deity who would symbolize imperial power, the per-
son of the emperor, and the new astral religion. Aurelian
found such a god in Palmyra, the oasis city in the Syrian de-
sert. Aurelian dedicated a fortune in gold, silver, and jewels
from his plunder to restore the temple of the Sun in Palmyra.
In 274 CE he established Sol Invictus (“the invincible sun”)
as the official religion of the Roman empire, and was the first
emperor to wear Oriental robes and the diadem, a sun sym-
bol. Sol Invictus continued as supreme god and patron of
emperors until Constantine, who started his reign as a sun
worshiper and later turned the empire over to Christianity.
The coins of Aurelian and of succeeding emperors show the
Sun offering the ruler, as Preserver of the World, a globe.8840 SUN