The connection of Mithras with the sun is also by no means easy to unravel. The Vedic Mitra was, as we have seen, originally the material sun itself, and the many hundreds of votive inscriptions left by the worshippers of Mithras to “the unconquered Sun Mithras[834],” to the unconquered solar divinity (_numen_) Mithras[835], to the unconquered Sun-God (_deus_) Mithra[836], and allusions in them to the priests (_sacerdotes_), worshippers (_cultores_), and temples (_templum_) of the same deity leave no doubt open that he was in Roman times a sun-god[837]. Yet this does not necessarily mean that he was actually the day-star visible to mankind, and the Greeks knew well enough how to distinguish between Apollo the god of light who was once at any rate a sun-god, and Helios the Sun itself[838]. On the Mithraic sculptures, we frequently see the unmistakable figure of Mithras riding in the chariot of the Sun-God driven by the divinity with long hair and a rayed nimbus, whom we know to be this Helios or his Roman equivalent, going through some ceremony of consecration with him, receiving messages from him, and seated side by side with him at a banquet which is evidently a ritual feast. M. Cumont explains this by the theory that Mithras, while in Persia and in the earliest Aryan traditions the genius of the celestial light only[839], no sooner passed into Semitic countries and became affected by the astrological theories of the Chaldaeans, than he was identified with their sun-god Shamash[840], and this seems as reasonable a theory as can be devised. Another way of accounting for what he calls the “at first sight contradictory proposition” that Mithras at once was and was not the sun[841], is to suppose that while the Mithraists wished those who did not belong to their faith to believe that they themselves worshipped the visible luminary, they yet instructed their votaries in private that he was a deity superior to it and in fact the power behind it. As we shall see, the two theories are by no means irreconcilable, although absolute proof of neither can yet be offered.