The Arctic Home in the Vedas c11.39

c11.39

The cows or oxen of Hêlios thus receive their background from the Veda, but what is told of them by Homer is by no means clear. When it is said that the companions of Odysseus consumed the oxen of Hêlios, and that they thus forfeited their return home, we can hardly take this in the modern sense of consuming or wasting their days, though it may be difficult to assign any other definite meaning to it. Equally puzzling is the fable alluded to in the Homeric hymn that Hermes stole the oxen of Apollon and killed two of them. The number of Apollon’s oxen is given as fifty (others give the number as 100 cows, twelve oxen and one bull), which looks like the number of weeks in the lunar year, but why Hermes should be represented as carrying off the whole herd and then killing two, is difficult to guess, unless we refer it to the two additional months in a cycle of four years.