Phaethon

Phaethon is the title of a lost tragedy written by Athenian playwright Euripides, first produced circa 420 BC, and covered the myth of Phaethon, the young mortal boy who asked his father the sun god Helios to drive his solar chariot for a single day. The play has been lost, though several fragments of it survive. Another treatment of the myth had been delivered earlier by Aeschylus in his lost play Heliades ("daughters of the Sun"), whose content and plot are even more fragmentary and obscure. The influence of Euripides' play on Ovid's version of the myth can be easily recognized. From this now lost play only twelve fragments remain, covering around 400 lines or so. Plot Euripides' version of the myth was set in a mortal landscape, with Phaethon nominally the son of the Oceanid nymph Clymene by her lawful husband and putative father of her children Merops, king of the far-eastern land of Aethiopia, but in truth her product of an illicit affair with Helios. The play opens with Clymene describing the sunlit country, her marriage to Merops, and her liaison with Helios that produced Phaethon. The conflict presented in the play is the marriage of Phaethon and the boy's reluctance; the bride's identity is one of the most difficult problems of this plot; suggestions include one of the Heliades, his sisters (a suggestion supported by Henri Weil and one that James Diggle deemed unprovable, though convinced of that being the case), or even Aphrodite. Explaining on how Aphrodite could be considered Phaethon's bride, Wilamowitz suggested 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. Another explanation is that Aphrodite had planned Phaethon's death from the beginning, as a revenge against his father who revealed her extramarital affair with Ares to her husband Hephaestus. Perhaps to get her son overcome his reluctance, Clymene revealed to Phaethon his true, divine parentage, and urged him to go travel and find his father to confirm so himself, mentioning that the god had promised to grant one favour back when he slept with her; convinced of the truth of his mother's words, Phaethon agrees to travel and find his biological father.