Phoebus then recovers his horses, and vents his rage on them. Grew from his sides, and from his mouth was madeĪnd yet he fears to trust the skies and Jove,Īnd therefore shuns the heat that he abhors,Īnd haunts the spacious lakes and pools and streams A slender neckĮxtended from his breast, and reddening toes There, as he made complaint, his manly voice Phaëthon’s beloved friend Cycnus is transformed into a swan: Phaëthon’s lamenting sisters are then transformed into poplar trees, and their tears into amber (electrum). The scorched remains of Phaëthon are buried by Naiads in a distant tomb, and his mother Clymene is left to mourn his death. The chariot lies broken, its horses scattered. The goddess of the Earth appeals to the gods, and Jupiter responds by throwing one of his thunderbolts at Phaëthon, who is killed instantly and falls to earth in flames. The Ethiopian people have their skin darkened as a result, and all the rivers of the earth are turned to vapour in the heat. The forests and the mountains are destroyed. Give fuel for self destruction-Oh what smallĬomplaints! Great cities perish with their walls,Īnd peopled nations are consumed to dust. The grass is blighted treesĪre burnt up with their leaves the ripe brown crops The highest altitudesĪre caught in flames, and as their moistures dry Run lower than her own, and sees the smoke Phoebe is wondering that her brother’s steeds The chariot comes too close to the earth, and starts melting the polar regions, and scorching its surface: He immediately loses control, and the sun runs off track. Phaëthon then leaps into the chariot, and departs on its course. In trying to dissuade Phaëthon from his wish, his father explains the great challenges which lie in controlling the chariot, as it crosses the constellations, and how difficult it is to restrain the team of horses.ĭespite Phoebus repeatedly telling his son how dangerous and disastrous his wish would prove, Phaëthon is insistent, and his father is bound by his oath. The mythical model of the sun portrays it as being drawn across the heavens by Phoebus’ chariot, with four horses (named by Ovid as Eous, Aethon, Pyrois, and Phlegon) in harness. Phoebus promises Phaëthon anything which he desires, so the youth asks to take charge of his father’s chariot of the sun for a day. Phaëthon then asks his presumed father Phoebus to give him a token to prove his paternity. Epaphus mocks Phaëthon, who in turn reports this to his mother, who despatches Phaëthon to visit his father in the Land of Dawn.īook 2 opens with a description of the Palace of the Sun. In Phaëthon’s case, his father is reputed to be Phoebus, the god of the sun, and his mother is Clymene. She is then supposed to have become Osiris, the Egyptian goddess, whose son following Jupiter’s rape of her is Epaphus.Įpaphus has a friend and rival who, like him, is the child of a single-parent family, with a god as the absent father. Ovid’s lead in to this story is through Io, who at the end of Book 1 is driven to Egypt, where she is transformed from being a cow back into human form. It balances the account of the Flood with that of the earth laid waste by fire, a myth which is much less common across different cultures, and may have its roots in one of the catastrophic volcanic events which occurred in the Mediterranean in ancient times. Cunningly, it is introduced in the last lines of Book 1, but told in full at the start of Book 2. The myth of Phaëthon is one of the longest stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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