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Son of Helios in Greek mythology

Phaethon ('/f//eɪ//.//ə//θ//ən/; Φαέθων, ), 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, and 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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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.</blockquote>

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.

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.

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.

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. 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 treated the myth in a comedic matter in his Dialogues of the Gods. In the short dialogue, Zeus angrily berates Helios for letting his inexperienced son drive his chariot, which almost resulted in the world being destroyed. Helios acknowledges his error, but claims he was pressured by Phaethon and Phaethon's mother Clymene both (another implication of the union between Helios and the mother of Phaethon being marital in nature, not an affair, and thus making their child legitimate), and could have not foreseen the extent of the disaster. Zeus is displeased to hear it, unconvinced that he would not know that an inexperienced driver like Phaethon would not be able to control the steeds. Helios then asks Zeus to be merciful, as his son has already been punished (being dead) and he himself is in great mourning. Zeus disagrees that this punishment is enough, returns Helios his damaged chariot which is in need of repair, and threatens to strike him with one of his thunderbolts should he ever do such thing again. In True History, another work of Lucian's, Phaethon is the king of the Sun and is at war with the Moon, ruled by King Endymion. Nonnus' late version of the story is one of the two extensive narratives to survive, the other being Ovid's. Unlike other versions, Nonnus' is one of the few where Phaethon is a legitimate offspring of a married couple, with his motivation shifting from need to prove his parentage to him wanting to imitate his idolized father. In Nonnus' account, found in his epic Dionysiaca, Hermes tells Dionysus the tragic story of Phaethon. Helios and the beautiful nymph Clymene fall in love and get married with her father Oceanus' blessing, and together they have Phaethon. Phaethon is raised by his parents, in the company of Oceanus and the Oceanid nymphs. As a boy, he would mimic his father and his daily journey by driving a wagon of his own design, with burning torches standing in for the fire. When he grows up, he begs his father to let him drive his chariot, but Helios refuses, arguing that sons are not necessarily fit to follow on their fathers' footsteps (bringing up how Ares, Hephaestus, Apollo and Hermes do not hold lightning bolts like their father Zeus does). Phaethon nevertheless is not a bit discouraged by his worried father's words, and then pressures him more, as does Clymene; with great reluctance, Helios consents, and gives his son a very extensive and detailed speech about all the dangers and the hazards of the ride. He then dresses Phaethon up in his own robes, helmet and solar crown and gives him the reins. With a final warning from his father, Phaethon yokes the horses and ascends in the sky, as his mother Clymene cheerfully waves him goodbye, still unaware of the danger that awaits her son. Like in all other versions, his ride is a disaster, as he burns the Earth. Zeus then kills him with a lightning bolt, and places him among the stars as the constellation Auriga, the charioteer of the heavens. Nonnus's version of the events is similar to that of Lucian, as both make (or imply) Clymene a wife to Helios, their son Phaethon born in marriage, and Clymene is actively present in persuading Helios to let their son drive the chariot.

A very common element of the story is that Phaethon's sisters, the Heliades, mourn his death by the river and transform into black poplars, shedding tears of amber for their lost brother. According to Pliny the Elder, it was Aeschylus who introduced the transformation of the sisters into poplar trees. Their number and names vary; a scholiast on Homer gives an alternative parentage where Phaethon and his three sisters (Phaethusa, Lampetia and Aegle) are the children of Helios and Rhodos, here the daughter of Asopus. Ovid vividly describes the sisters cry and mourn for their brother by the banks of the Eridanus for four months unmoving. Then, as they try to move, find themselves rooted to the ground, unable to leave. Their mother Clymene finds them, and although she tries to free her daughters by breaking off the forming branches and snapping the barks, she is unable to help them and the metamorphosis is completed. The Odyssey scholiast writes that Zeus, feeling pity for them, changed them into the amber crying poplar trees, and allowing them to retain the memories of their old lives and sorrows. and Hyginus wrote that they were transformed into trees for yoking the chariot without their father's consent. The poplar tree was considered sacred to Helios, due to the sun like brilliance its shining leaves have.

Later authors, particularly the Romans, mention the story of Cycnus, a man who was Phaethon's lover and deeply mourned his death and was turned into a swan, birds who are known for mourning the loss of their mates for days. In Ovid's account, the gods turned the inconsolable Cycnus into a swan soon after Phaethon's own death; even as a swan he retained memories of Phaethon's fiery demise, and the bird would thereafter avoid the sun's heat. Virgil instead writes that Cycnus mourned for Phaethon well into his old age, thereupon he was turned into a swan, his white hair becoming the bird's white feathers upon transformation. Pausanias and Servius explicitly name Apollo as the god who turned Cycnus into a swan, after having blessed him with talent in singing at some time before; Apollo then placed him among the stars, as the constellation Cygnus, "the swan". Cycnus' profession as a musician seems to be a direct reference to the swan song swans are famous for. Phaethon is shown fallen from the car, a wheel lying next to him while another is being collected by the water goddess Tethys, his grandmother, as Valerius Flaccus wrote. The god behind Phaethon's death, Zeus, is seen hurling his thunderbolt, while Helios appears on horse back, with a spare horse by his side (matching Euripides' telling where Helios accompanies his son in the sky), having caught two of the horses and now directing his attention to the other two (like Lucretius describes him doing). Artemis is there too, perhaps alluding to some obscure version where she played a role in the story, as is Iris, the rainbow and messenger goddess. Another figure, perhaps Isis, is also present.</blockquote>

The lesser known myth of Sirius the dog star god and the harvest goddess Opora share some elements with the myth of Phaethon. In that myth, Sirius visits the earth on some mission but then meets and falls in love with Opora. His unfulfilled love makes him burn hotter, which results in the humans suffering under the great heat he causes. They pray to the gods, and eventually Boreas the god of the north wind orders his sons to deliver Opora to Sirius while he uses cold wind blasts to cool the earth. To commemorate the event, Sirius would continue to burn hot each year during the harvest season, explaining the intense heat of the dog days of summer, attributed to Sirius by the ancients. In addition, some ancient authors used 'Sirius' (meaning "scorching") as an epithet for Helios himself. Phaethon's story shares some similarities to the myth of Asclepius, as mortal sons of divine fathers (Helios and Apollo) who disrupted natural order (Phaethon by driving the chariot off course, Asclepius by resurrecting the dead) and were then killed by Zeus in order to establish that order again after complains from other divinities (Gaia and Hades), bringing sorrow to said fathers. Phaethon's myth was the preeminent myth involving amber in classical antiquity, and according to Celtic tradition, Apollo shed tears of amber for Asclepius' death; while Apollo's association with amber is not extraordinary, the context of it (mourning for his son) is significant. Diodorus Siculus in his own account of Phaethon ended by saying that amber was commonly used in connection to mourning the death of young people, The second narrative on Phaethon however, from the so dubbed "Second Vatican Mythographer", recounts the more traditional version of the myth with no traces of amalgamation with other myths or any connection to Asclepius.

Dante refers to the episode in the Inferno, in "Purgatorio" canto IV and Paradiso canto XVII of his Divine Comedy. William Shakespeare uses the story of Phaethon in four places, most famously as an allegory in his play Richard II, comparing the King to the divinity of the sun: "Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon, wanting the manage of unruly jades" (3.3). He also makes Juliet wish "Phaëthon would whip [Phoebus's horses] to the west" as she waits for Romeo in Romeo and Juliet 3.2.3. It also appears briefly in The Two Gentlemen of Verona 3.1.154, and twice in Henry VI, Part 3 (1.4.33 and 2.6.12)
John Marston includes reference to Phaeton in The Malcontent whereby Mendoza's monologue describes the '  sparkling glances (of women), ardent as those flames that singed the world by heedless Phaeton!' – act 1, sc 5
Jean Baptiste Lully wrote a musical tragedy, Phaëton, in which he referred indirectly to the fate of Nicolas Fouquet, whose ambitions to imitate Louis XIV – The Sun King – brought about his downfall. This opera is also used in the second version of Paul Hindemith’s opera Cardillac (1952). Camille Saint Saëns wrote a symphonic poem entitled Phaéton in 1873. Niccolò Jommelli wrote an opera Fetonte to an Italian language libretto by Mattia Verazi using various sources, principally Ovid, for the myth of Phaeton. It was first performed at the Ducal Theatre, Ludwigsburg in February, 1768, where Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg maintained an opera troupe. Wilhelm Waiblinger’s epistolary novel Phaëthon amalgamates the Phaethon myth with Goethe’s Werther as well as Hölderlin’s Hyperion. Johann Wolfgang Goethe published a poetic reconstruction of Euripides’ fragmented tragedy in Kunst und Altertum (1823), which served as a basis for various full scale dramatic adaptations such as Marie Wernicke’s Phaethons Sturz (1893), Karl Wilhelm Geißler’s Phaëthon (1889) and Arnold Beer’s Phaeton (1875). Gerhart Hauptmann’s long poem Helios und Phaethon (1936) omits the cosmic disaster in order to focus on the relationship between godly father and mortal son. In Otakar Theer's symbolist tragedy Faëthón (1916), the hero epitomizes man's revolt against the world order ("the gods") and against human destiny. The tragedy was adapted in 1962 into a celebrated eponymous radio play by Miloslav Jareš (director) and Jaromír Ptáček (dramaturge). Paul Goodman’s early Phaëthon, Myth (1934) juxtaposes the Phaethon myth with a grotesque version of a Christological narrative. Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for oboe, first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival on 14 June 1951, include the short piece Phaeton, which as a solo piece seems to focus on the individual lost in space, rather than the furious effects emphasised by earlier instrumental renditions of the myth. In Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, an in universe opera is composed by the character of Richard Halley, where Phaeton succeeds in his attempt to control the chariot of the Sun, as an allegory for the power of mankind and individualism. Donald Cotton wrote a comedy radio play The Tragedy of Phaethon broadcast on BBC Network 3, 10 February 1965. Angus Wilson’s novel Setting the World on Fire (1980) opens with the description of a Phaethon painting which proves pivotal to the protagonist's emerging self conception, leading up to his production of Lully’s Phaëton. John C. Wright's The Golden Oecumene trilogy (2002) features a protagonist named Phaethon, whose father's name is Helion. Mythical references abound. In 2002, Volkswagen introduced the VW Phaeton. In 2012, former Disco Inferno frontman Ian Crause adapted the story of Phaethon as The Song of Phaethon for his first musical release in over a decade. Crause used the story as an analogy for Britain's entry into the Second Gulf War. In 2016, Taffety Punk Theatre premiered Michael Milligan's play "Phaeton" in Washington, DC. In 2019, Carl Rütti set to music an early modern interpretation of Sebastian Brant's Phaethon story, which equates the fall of Phaethon with a solar eclipse, but has Phaethon survive and return triumphant. Two versions exist for male choir and mixed choir, the latter as part of Rütti's four part solar eclipse cantata "Eklipsis".

The name "Phaethon", which means "Shining One", was given also to Phaethon of Syria, to one of the horses of Eos (the Dawn), the Sun, the constellation Auriga, and the planet Jupiter, while as an adjective it was used to describe the sun and the moon. In some accounts the planet referred to by this name is not Jupiter but Saturn. When 1 Ceres and 2 Pallas – the first asteroids – were discovered, astronomer Heinrich Olbers suggested that they were fragments of a much larger hypothetical planet, which was later named Phaethon. However, the 'Phaeton hypothesis' has been superseded by the accretion model, in which the asteroid belt represented the remainder of the protoplanetary disk that never formed a planet, due to the interference of the gravity of Jupiter. However, fringe theorists still consider the Phaeton hypothesis likely. In modern times, an asteroid whose orbit brings it close to the Sun has been named "3200 Phaethon" after the mythological Phaethon. The French form of the name "Phaethon" is "Phaéton". This form of the word is applied to a kind of carriage and automobile. An order, family, and genus of birds bear the name Phaethon in their taxonomic nomenclature, the tropicbirds.

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in two volumes: (Vol. 1) ; (Vol. 2)

The Vatican Mythographers, Ronald E. Pepin (2008), Fordham University Press, .