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Essays: News

CONTEXT

Phaethon was the son of Helios and Clymene. Helios was the god of the sun and Clymene was a Oceanid. All Phaethon really wanted to do was drive his dad’s chariot (the sun). When Helios finally caved and let Phaethon drive, the boy was elated. Helios reminded him to stay in the middle path because if he flew too low he’d burn the Earth and if he flew too high he’d freeze it. Phaethon agreed to this happily and took the reins. The horses that pulled the chariot were firey and difficult to control, but Phaethon was confident in his abilities and took off. Everything was going fine until the horses started to become restless. They knew that it wasn’t Helios who was controlling them and they were not happy about that. The horses pulled Phaethon off track, flying low to the ground and burning the Sahara then swiftly flying high and freezing the Alps. Zeus caught wind of this and watched for a moment as Phaethon burned and froze the Earth. In order to put a stop to all that, Zeus threw a lightning bolt at Phaethon and the chariot which caused them both to come crashing out of the sky. Both Phaethon and the chariot landed in the Po River in Italy, and that’s where Phaethon’s sisters found him. The Heliades were heartbroken by the death of their brother and grieved for four months. Zeus eventually turned them into poplar trees and turned their tears into amber. The amber tears fell into the river and were carried away, eventually to be used as jewelry by Roman women. After Zeus killed his son and turned his daughters into trees, Helios was distraught and refused to drive the sun.

Essays: Text
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ARTISTIC ANALYSIS

There’s not really a lot of art of Phaethon. There’s some modern paintings and pretty much just one clay pot, but it’s definitely less than some other, more well known, myths. What Phaethon does have that lots of Metamorphoses don’t is a scene in Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman. In the play, most myths are portrayed pretty much to the letter of how they were written, however, Phaethon has a more modern twist. The scene opens with him jumping into the pool with a bright yellow inflatable raft, swim trunks, and sunglasses. He lays on the raft and watches the ceiling as he starts recounting his tale to a therapist, who interrupts with long wordy sentences that Phaethon never seems to hear. Phaethon’s rambling account of his myth sounds like a bored kid, only telling you about his day because you asked, especially when juxtaposed with the Therapist’s clinical explanations. He talks about how kids at his private school mocked him for saying that his dad was the sun, and that’s what drove Phaethon to ask Helios to drive the chariot. This allows for some humor to enter the somber tale.

Essays: Text
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