What happened to Phaethon?

A son who needed proof

Ovid starts the story at the end of Book 1 of the Metamorphoses. Phaethon boasts that his father is the Sun, and his friend Epaphus, a son of Jupiter, laughs at him: “Poor, demented fellow.” Stung, Phaethon asks his mother, Clymene, for proof. She lifts her arms to the sky and swears by the Sun himself that it is true. Go and ask him, she says; his house is where the day rises.

Who was Phaethon’s father? Ovid calls him Sol, the Sun, and often Phoebus, a name the Sun shares with Apollo. The Greeks called him Helios. Later writers merged the Sun with Apollo, which is why some retellings make Apollo the father; the page on the Roman names of the Greek gods untangles the pairs.

The oath and the chariot

In his palace of gold and silver, the Sun lays aside his crown of rays, embraces the boy and, to end all doubt, swears by the Styx, the oath even gods cannot break, to grant whatever he asks. Phaethon asks for the chariot of the Sun for one day.

His father regrets the oath at once: “for thou art mortal, and thou hast aspired to things immortal.” He warns of the steep climb, the fire-breathing horses and the beasts of the zodiac, and gives one rule: “In the middle is the safest path.” But an oath is an oath.

The day the world burned

The four horses, Pyrois, Eous, Aethon and Phlegon, feel how light the chariot is and run off the road. Phaethon does not know their names, and could not hold them if he did. When he sees the Scorpion of the zodiac, he drops the reins. The chariot swings too high and scorches the sky, then too low and sets the earth alight. Ovid lists the burning mountains, from Athos and Etna to the Alps; Libya dries into desert, and the Nile flees and hides its head, which is hidden still, he says.

Earth herself lifts her scorched face and begs Zeus, Ovid’s Jupiter, to act. He hurls a thunderbolt. The chariot breaks apart, and Phaethon falls with his hair on fire, like a shooting star, into the distant river Eridanus, which the Romans took to be the Po. The nymphs of the west bury him and carve his epitaph:

Here Phaethon lies: in Phoebus’ car he fared, and though he greatly failed, more greatly dared.

Amber, a swan and a word

For a whole day, Ovid says, the grieving Sun does not rise, and the burning world is its only light. Phaethon’s sisters, daughters of the Sun, mourn at the tomb for four months until their feet take root and bark closes over them. They become poplars, and their tears harden into amber, which the river carries off “to deck the Latin women.” His kinsman Cycnus grieves until he turns into a swan, a bird that still keeps to the water, away from the fire of the sky.

The Greek for amber is elektron. Rubbed, amber pulls in dust and straw, and in 1600 the English physician William Gilbert built the Latin word electricus from it; English had “electricity” by 1646. So every switch you flip carries a trace of those tears, which turn up again among Pygmalion’s gifts to his statue.

The driver’s name lasted too. In the 1700s a phaeton was a light, fast open carriage, named for the reckless boy, and later a style of open car. And every December the Geminid meteors stream from the dust of the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, discovered in 1983.