PHAETHON (Gr. gSaEBwv, shining, radiant)  , in Greek mythology, the son of Helios the sun-god, and the nymph Clymene . He persuaded his father to let him drive the chariot of the sun across the sky, but he lost control of the horses, and driving too near the earth scorched it . To save the world from utter destruction Zeus killed Phaethon with a thunderbolt . He fell to earth at the mouth of the Eridanus, a river of northern Europe (identified in later times with the Po), on the banks of which his weeping sisters, the Heliades, were transformed into poplars and their tears into amber . This part of the legend points to the mouth of the Oder or Vistula, where amber abounds . Phaethon was the subject of a drama of the same name by Euripides, of which some fragments remain, and of a lost tragedy of Aeschylus (Heliades) ; the story is most fully told in the Metamorphoses of Ovid (i . 750-ii . 366 and Nonnus, Dionysiaca, xxxviii) . Phaethon has been identified with the sun himself and with the morning star (Phosphorus) . In the former case the legend is supposed to represent the sun sinking in the west in a blaze of light . His identification with the morning star is supported by Hyginus (Astron. ii . 42), where it is stated that the morning (and evening) star was the son of Cephalus and Eos (the father and mother of Phaethon according to Hesiod, Theog .

984-986) . The fall of Phaethon is a favourite subject, especially on

sarcophagus reliefs, as indicating the transitoriness of human life . See G . Knaack, " Quaestiones Phaethonteae," in Philologische Untersuchungen (1885); F . Wieseler, Phaethon (1857); Wilamowitz-M011endorff and C . Robert in Hermes, xviii . (1883) ; Frazer's Pausanias, ii . 59 ; S . Reinach, Revue de 1' /list. des religions, lviii . (1908) .