Phaethon (; , ), also spelled Phaëthon, is the son of the Oceanid Clymene and the sun god Helios in Greek mythology.
According to most authors, Phaethon is the son of Helios who, out of a desire to have his parentage confirmed, travels to the sun god's palace in the east. He is recognised by his father and asks for the privilege of driving his chariot for a single day. Despite Helios' fervent warnings and attempts to dissuade him, 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, cry tears of amber and are turned to black poplar as they mourn him.
Phaethon's tale was commonly used to explain why uninhabitable 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 means "radiant", from the verb , meaning "to shine."A Greek–English Lexicon s.v. 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.'
Family
Phaethon was said to be the son of Clymene the Oceanid and Helios, god of the sun. Alternatively, less common genealogies make him a son of Clymenus by a different Oceanid, Merope, of Helios and Rhodos and thus a full brother of the Heliadae, or of Helios and Prote. According to a scholion on the Odyssey, Phaethon's mother Clymene was not an Oceanid, but rather a mortal woman, a daughter of Minyas, who married Helios.
Mythology Details vary across different versions, 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 does not 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.
Homer and Hesiod
Although Helios himself is present in their works, 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.Smith, s.v. HeliosKeightley, p. 56, 62Vergados, p. 286
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 seems to recognize is the son of Eos, Helios' sister and the goddess of the dawn, whom she had by her lover Cephalus, an Athenian prince.
The late Roman author 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.Diggle, pp 22-23 A fragment from Hesiod very possibly connects Eridanus to amber.Hesiod. fr. 150. 21-24 Merkelback-West (= Pap. Oxy. 1358) 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.Diggle, p. 24
The tragic poets Ancient written sources for Phaethon Author Work Date Pseudo-Hesiod? Unknown (lost) 7th century BC Aeschylus Heliades (lost) late 500s-mid 400s BC Philoxenus of Cythera Unknown (lost) 5th to 4th century BC Euripides Phaethon (fragmentary), Hippolytus ca 420s BC Theodorides Phaethon (lost) 363 BC Plato Timaeus 360 BC Phanocles Loves or Beautiful Boys (fragmentary) 336-323 BC Palaephatus On Unbelievable Tales late 300s BC? Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica 200s BC Nicander Unknown (Heteroeumena?) (lost) 100s BC Satyrus the Peripatetic Unknown (lost) 180-146 BC Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca historica 60-30 BC Lucretius De rerum natura c. 50s BC Cicero De Natura Deorum 45 BC Virgil Aeneid 19 BC Strabo Geographica 7 BC - 23 AD Ovid Metamorphoses 8 AD Seneca the Younger Medea c. 50 AD Pliny the Elder Natural History 77 AD Valerius Flaccus Argonautica c.79 AD Statius Thebaid 80-90 AD Plutarch Moralia c.100 AD Lucian Dialogues of the Gods; Amber, Or The Swans 100s AD Pausanias Description of Greece 150-180 AD Hyginus Fabulae, Astronomica 100s AD Servius Commentary on Aeneid ca 300s AD-400s AD Quintus Smyrnaeus Posthomerica Late 300s AD? Nonnus Dionysiaca 400s AD Scholia on the Odyssey 5th century BC to 9th century? First and Second Vatican Mythographers Mythography 9th–11th century? John Tzetzes Chiliades 12th century
A now-lost tragedy by Aeschylus, titled Heliades ("daughters of the Sun") was written covering the subject of this myth. Very little of this play survives now, and the form of the myth as assumed by Aeschylus is impossible to know. 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 grief, mourning, and lamentation. He seems to have transferred the location of Phaethon's fall in Iberia, west of Italy.
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, pp 32-33 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.Diggle, p. 12 Another explanation on how Phaethon could possibly be marrying 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 unprovable, 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.Cod. Claromont. - Pap. Berl. 9771, Euripides fragment 773 Nauck 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 chariot, 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.Diggle, p. 42 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 at the Lenaea festival, nothing of which survives to us.
Brief 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 [Greeks] have 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.Translation by Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) reproduced in, for example, John Michael Greer, Atlantis (Llewelyn Worldwide 2007 ), p. 9
Authors of the Hellenistic era 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 not named, as Zeus takes no action to stop Phaethon and save the Earth.Palaephatus, On Unbelievable Tales 52
In the 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 smoldering 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.Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.596-610; 4.620-626