Phaethon

Phaethon (; grc, Φαέθων, Phaéthōn, ), also spelled Phaëthon, was the son of the Oceanid Clymene and the sun-god Helios in Greek mythology.

According to most authors, Phaethon is the son of Helios, and out of desire to have his parentage confirmed, travels to the sun-god's palace in the east. There he is recognised by his father, and asks him for the privilege to drive his chariot for a single day. Despite Helios' fervent warnings and attempts to talk him out of it, counting the numerous dangers he would face in his celestial journey and reminding Phaethon that only he can control the horses, the boy is not dissuaded and does not change his mind. He is then allowed to take the chariot's reins; his ride is disastrous, as he cannot keep a firm grip on the horses. As a result, he drives the chariot too close to the earth, burning it, and too far from it, freezing it. In the end, after many complaints, from the stars in the sky to the earth itself, Zeus strikes Phaethon with one of his lightning bolts, killing him instantly. His dead body falls into the river Eridanus, and his sisters the Heliades are turned to black poplar trees as they mourn him.

Phaethon's tale was commonly used to explain why inhabitable lands on both sides of extremity (such as hot deserts and frozen wastelands) exist, and why certain peoples have darker complexions, while his sisters' amber tears accounted for the river's rich deposits of amber.

Etymology

Ancient Greek , ''Phaethon'', means "radiant", from the verb , meaning "to shine." Therefore, his name could be understood as, "the shining/radiant (one)" Ultimately the word derives from , ''phaos'', the Greek word for light, from the Proto-Indo-European root ''*bheh₂-'', 'to shine.'

Mythology

Details vary according to version, but most have Phaethon travel far east to meet his father, sometimes in order to get him to assure his paternity. There, he asks Helios for permission to drive his father's sun-chariot for a single day. Despite Helios' protests and advice against, Phaethon doesn't back down from his initial wish, and thus Helios reluctantly allows him to drive his chariot. Placed in charge of the chariot, Phaethon was unable to control the horses. In some versions, the Earth first froze when the horses climbed too high, but when the chariot then scorched the Earth by swinging too near, Zeus decided to prevent disaster by striking it down with a thunderbolt. Phaethon fell to earth and was killed in the process.

Family

Phaethon was said to be the son of the Oceanid Clymene and the sun god Helios. Alternatively, less common genealogies make him a son of Clymenus by Oceanid Merope, of Helios and Rhodos (thus a full brother of the Heliadae) or of Helios and Prote.

Homer and Hesiod

For the two earliest ancient Greek authors, Homer and Hesiod, the chariot and the four horses that pull Helios each morning do not seem to exist at all; the oldest work in which they appear being the ''Homeric Hymns''.

Neither seems to know Phaethon as an individual, as "Phaethon", meaning "the radiant" seems to be exclusively an epithet used for Helios by them. The only Phaethon Hesiod seem to recognize is the son of Eos, Helios' sister and the goddess of the dawn, by her lover Cephalus.

Hyginus however attributes a version of the story to Hesiod. According to Hyginus, Hesiod wrote that Phaethon was the son of Merope, an Oceanid, and Clymenus, a son of Helios by an unnamed woman or goddess. Phaethon, upon learning that his grandfather is the Sun, put his chariot to bad use, and scorched the earth, turning the Indians black in the process. He was struck by a thunderbolt, and fell dead on the river Eridanus. Even the firmest believers of Hyginus find the attribution of the tale to Hesiod hard to accept. A fragment from Hesiod very possibly connects Eridanus to amber. it is uncertain, but possible, that the fragment also connected Eridanus and amber to the tears of the Heliades; what is certain however is that Hesiod was not connecting Eridanus, amber and perhaps the Heliades, to the myth of Phaethon.

The tragic poets

A now-lost tragedy by Aeschylus, titled ''Heliades'' ("daughters of the Sun") was written covering the subect of this myth. Very little of this play survives now. It would seem that in Aeschylus' play, the sisters played a significant role; two of the surviving fragments (F 71 and F 72) focus on lamentation.

By contrast, Euripides' version of the story, the now lost tragedy '' Phaethon'', while similarly fragmentary, is much better preserved, with twelve fragments surviving covering some 400 lines of text. According to the summary of the play, Phaethon is the son of Helios by an Oceanid named Clymene, who nonetheless hid the boy's true parentage and claimed he had been fathered by her nominal husband Merops, the king of Aethiopia (Merops and Clymene are an interesting swap of the names in Hyginus' Hesiodic version, Merope and Clymenus).Gantz, p
32-33
/ref> The main conflict of the play is the upcoming marriage of an unwilling Phaethon.

The identity of the bride seems to be this fragmentary play's greatest mystery. Euripides seems to have made Aphrodite the bride of the unfortunate youth; if that is the case, then it would seem that Euripides combined the stories of two Phaethons, that of the son of Helios who drove his father's car and died, and that of Phaethon the son of Helios' sister Eos whom Aphrodite abducted to be a watchman of her shrines, and whom late antiquity writers described as a lover of the goddess, as suggested by Wilamowitz. Another explanation on how Phaethon could be possibly be getting married to the goddess of beauty is that Aphrodite had planned Phaethon's destruction from the very beginning, as revenge against his father for revealing to Hephaestus, her husband, the goddess' affair with Ares, the god of war. Henri Weil suggested that Phaethon is to marry one of the Heliades, and James Diggle, while deeming this suggestion improvable, is convinced of it being the case.

Clymene reveals her son his true parentage, perhaps to help him overcome his reluctance to get married. Although doubtful at first, his mother's words convince him and agrees to travel east to find his divine father and have his parentage confirmed. What happens next is that someone, perhaps a ''paedagogus'', arrives in the scene to inform the audience of Phaethon's disastrous ride. According to his account, Helios actually escorted his son on his doomed journey, riding on a horse named Sirius next to him and shouting instructions and advice on how to drive the car, an element not found in subsequent treatments of the myth.

Surviving fragments do not clearly paint Zeus as the culprit of Phaethon's death; but next Clymene orders slave girls to hide Phaethon's smoking body from Merops (who is still unaware both of Phaethon's true parentage as well as his fiery death), pointing to Zeus having indeed played a role in the boy's death. Merops discovers his son's charred corpse, and the truth, a bit later.

The only other tragedy about the myth is Theodorides' now lost ''Phaethon'', performed in 363 BC, nothing of which survives to us.

References to the myth of Phaethon

With Aeschylus being the earliest (as far as it can be determined) that Phaethon's story would have been known, the next mention possibly came from a lost work of Philoxenus of Cythera (435~434 – 380~379 BC), a dithyrambic poet. Pliny the Elder mentions him second (after Aeschylus) among the authors who spoke of the myth of the sun god's son. Pliny also names Nicander and Satyrus as other authors who knew of Phaethon.

Plato's ''Timaeus''

In Plato's ''Timaeus'', Critias tells the story of Atlantis as recounted to Solon by an Egyptian priest, who prefaced the story by saying:

There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story that even you reekshave preserved, that once upon a time, Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals.

Palaphaetus' ''On Unbelievable Tales''

Like other authors of around this period, Palaephatus's version is not too rich in details. Naming no mother, Palaphaetus speaks of Phaethon as a son of Helios who had the irrational desire to drive his father's chariot, but had no knowledge of how to handle the reins. Unable to keep balance he was swept off course by the wild horses and drowned into the Eridanus river. Unlike several other retellings, a party behind Phaethon's death is no named, as Zeus takes no action to stop Phaethon and save the earth.

Apollonius Rhodius' ''Argonautica''

While sailing up the Eridanus river on their way back, the Argonauts reach the outfall of the deep lake where Phaethon fell after he was struck with a lightning bolt. During the day, the crew of the Argo was tormented by the nauseating stench from Phaethon's corpse, still smouldering after all this time, and at night they had to listen to the lament of his sisters, now turned into poplar trees and shedding tears of amber.

Diodorus Siculus' ''Historic Library''

Phaethon, the son of Helios, while still a youth persuaded his father to retire for a single day and give to him his chariot. His father eventually yielded to his son's wishes, and gave him his quadriga. The boy was unable to control the reins, and the horses left their accustomed course, setting ablaze the Heavens (creating the Milky Way) and the Earth (creating uninhabitable land) alike. Zeus, seeing the catastrophe, smote Phaethon with a thunderbolt and brought the sun to its course. Phaethon fell into the Eridanus river, dead. His sisters mourned him, and turned into black poplar trees. Diodorus Siculus, '' Library of History'
5.23.1

2
/ref>

Ovid

The influence of Euripides' lost play can be easily recognized in Ovid's own version of the myth.Diggle, p
7–8
/ref> Another possible inspiration of Ovid's version might have been Nicander, who is known to have written about Phaethon in some work, perhaps attested in the lost ''Heteroeumena'' (loosely translating into "transformations"). In the version of the myth told by Ovid, Phaethon is the son of Clymene and the sun-god Sol, who would often boast about being the son of the sun-god. Phaethon, challenged by Epaphus and his playmates, sought assurance from his mother that his father was Sol indeed. She gave him the requested assurance and told him to turn to his father for confirmation. He asked his father for some proof that would demonstrate his relationship with the sun. When the god swore by the river Styx to grant him whatever he wanted, he insisted on being allowed to drive the sun chariot for a day. Sol tried to talk him out of it by telling him that not even Jupiter (the king of the gods) would dare to drive it, as the chariot was fiery hot and the horses breathed out flames. He said:

The first part of the track is steep, and one that my fresh horses at dawn can hardly climb. In mid-heaven it is highest, where to look down on earth and sea often alarms even me and makes my heart tremble with awesome fear. The last part of the track is downwards and needs sure control. Then even Tethys herself, who receives me in her submissive waves, is accustomed to fear that I might dive headlong. Moreover, the rushing sky is constantly turning, and drags along the remote stars, and whirls them in rapid orbits. I move the opposite way, and its momentum does not overcome me as it does all other things, and I ride contrary to its swift rotation. Suppose you are given the chariot. What will you do? Will you be able to counter the turning poles so that the swiftness of the skies does not carry you away? Perhaps you conceive in imagination that there are groves there and cities of the gods and temples with rich gifts. The way runs through the ambush, and apparitions of wild beasts! Even if you keep your course, and do not steer awry, you must still avoid the horns of Taurus the Bull, Sagittarius the Haemonian Archer, raging Leo and Lion's jaw, Scorpio's cruel pincers sweeping out to encircle you from one side, and Cancer's crab-claws reaching out from the other. You will not easily rule those proud horses, breathing out through mouth and nostrils the fires burning in their chests. They scarcely tolerate my control when their fierce spirits are hot, and their necks resist the reins. Beware, my boy, that I am not the source of a gift fatal to you, while something can still be done to set right your request!

Phaethon, however, was adamant, and thus Sol was forced to relent. When the day came, the fierce horses that drew the chariot felt that it was empty because of the lack of the sun-god's weight and went out of control. Terrified, Phaethon dropped the reins. The horses veered from their course, scorching the earth, burning the vegetation, bringing the blood of the Ethiopians to the surface of their skin and so turning it black, changing much of Africa into a desert, drying up rivers and lakes and shrinking the sea. Earth cried out to Jupiter who was forced to intervene by striking Phaethon with a lightning bolt. Like a falling star, Phaethon plunged blazing into the river Eridanus.

The epitaph on his tomb was:
:Here Phaethon lies who in the sun-god's chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

Sol, stricken with grief at his son's death, at first refused to resume his work of driving his chariot, but at the appeal of the other gods, including Jupiter, returned to his task.

The detail of Phaethon questioning the parentage he otherwise took pride in being the result of Epaphus' words is also present in the works of Servius, who wrote that Epaphus, now presented as the succeeded king of Egypt, mocked Phaethon for being born out of adultery; the outcome is largely the same, as Phaethon travels east to meet his father, gets Helios to promise him any favour, and then drives the chariot with disastrous results.

Other late authors

Philostratus, who follows the typical premise of Phaethon's tale (son of Helios who asks his father to drive his chariot and ends up burning the earth) describes in great detail the extent of the catastrophe, putting more detail in the picture and the visual representation rather than the action; the Night drives away the Day from the noonday sky, the sun's orb plunges into the earth pulling the stars along with him, the Seasons abandon their posts in fear, and the Earth raises her hands in supplication as she burns. In the end Phaethon falls from the chariot, himself on fire too, and dies. The Eridanus mourns him along with the Heliades.

According to Clement of Alexandria "... in the time of Crotopus occurred the burning of Phaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion". In ''The Twelve Caesars'', Suetonius attributes to the emperor Tiberius the following repeated remark about the future emperor Gaius Caligula: "That to allow Gaius to live would prove the ruin of himself and of all men, and that he was raising a viper for the Roman people and a Phaethon for the world".

A scholiast on Homer's ''Odyssey'' provides a different parentage for Phaethon, making him the son of Helios and Rhodos instead (thus full brother to the Heliadae), here the daughter of Asopus, the river god. The scholiast follows the version of Phaethon being raised by his mother; when he learns the truth, he seeks out Helios and asks him to drive his chariot. Helios allows him not due to some promise or vow he made to his son, but rather because of his son's persistence, despite knowing what would follow. In accordance with other authors, Zeus strikes him with a thunderbolt. The element of Helios knowing what's in store for his child, but being unable to thwart it, is present in several tellings; Statius writes that "with tears did he warn the rejoicing youth of treacherous stars and zones that would fain not be o'errun and the temperate heat that lies midway between the poles; obedient was he and cautious, but he cruel Parcae would not suffer him to learn."

Valerius Flaccus gives attention to the wrecked chariot itself, and how Tethys, who is Phaethon's grandmother as well as the goddess who receives Helios in the western ocean as he sets, picks up the fragments of yoke and axle, and one of the horses too ( Pyrois) who is fearful of a father's wrath.

Cicero, another Roman author, describes Sol as being "tricked" into letting his son drive his chariot, expressing surprise and disbelief that a god could be deceived like that.

Seneca speaks of Phaethon, the
: "youth who dared drive the everlasting chariot, heedless of his father's goal."

Phaethon as a legitimate offspring

Hyginus wrote that Phaethon, son of Helios / Sol and Clymene, secretly mounted his father's car without said father's knowledge and leave, but with the aid of his sisters the Heliades who yoked the horses. Being inexperienced, Phaethon drove the chariot too high, and it was fear that made him plunge into the Eridanus; when Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt, the earth began to burn. Zeus then, pretending to want to put out the fire, let loose all the rivers everywhere, causing the flood that drowned everyone except for Deucalion and Pyrrha. Phaethon secretly stealing the chariot, and his sisters helping him out perhaps implies the existence of an early version, where Phaethon and his (full) sisters are legitimate offspring of the sun god and his wife, brought up in their father's house, rather than product(s) of an extramarital liaison. After his death, Phaethon was conveyed to the stars by his father as a constellation. The constellation associated with Phaethon was the Auriga, or the Charioteer.

The satirical author Lucian of Samosata

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