Phaethon and the Chariot of the Sun
In brief
- Phaethon was told the sun god was his father, and when a friend refused to believe it he went east to hear it from Helios himself.
- Helios acknowledged him and swore by the Styx to grant him any request; Phaethon asked to drive the sun chariot for one day.
- The horses knew a stranger's hand immediately and bolted, scorching the earth, until Zeus struck him out of the sky and he fell into the Eridanus.
Phaethon's mother told him his father was the Sun. A boy his own age told him it was a story his mother had made up, and there was nothing to be done about that except to go and ask. He walked east until he reached the palace where the light comes from, and Helios, sitting in it, put the crown of rays aside so the boy could come closer, and said yes.
Then he made the mistake. To settle it beyond argument, he swore by the Styx, the oath the gods cannot break, that he would grant whatever his son asked for. Phaethon asked for the chariot, for one day.
Helios spent a long time trying to talk him out of it. The horses were barely his to hold. The road ran up so steeply at the start that he did not care to look down, and dropped so sharply at the end that the sea gods watching feared for him. Nothing in the sky was fixed; it all turned against him as he crossed it. Ask for anything else, he said. The boy would not.
The team knew within moments that the weight behind them was wrong. They left the road and climbed, then plunged, and where they went low the rivers dried and the fields caught and the Libyan desert was burned into existence. Earth herself finally called up to Zeus, who had no time for a gentle remedy: he threw a thunderbolt, and Phaethon came out of the sky with his hair on fire and fell into the river Eridanus, far from home, where his sisters stood on the bank until they turned into poplars.
