Phaethon (mythology)
Phaethon (also Phaeton or Phaethon , ancient Greek Φαέθων , actually "the Radiant" to φαίνειν , seem ') is in the Greek mythology in Hesiod the son of Cephalus and the goddess Eos , the sister of the sun god Helios . Since Euripides Phaethon has been the son of Helios and Clymene , a nephew of Eos.
Phaethon, the son of Helios, is mentioned in Plato's Timaeus , for example . The best-known variants of the myth come from Hesiod and Ovid , who in his Metamorphoses (1,747–2,400) developed the most detailed and canonical reading of the story of the daring sky-stormer to this day.
Phaeton is also significant as a namesake in science and technology, see Phaeton .
Representation of Ovid
When Phaethon grew up, Epaphos , the son of Io and Zeus, denied him the divine descent from Helios. The mother Klymene assures Phaethon that he is the son of the sun god and advises that he visit the father in the sun palace and ask for a certificate of his fatherhood. Helios, the sun god, who welcomes him into the palace and recognizes him as a son, undertakes by means of an oath to grant the son a gift of his choice.
Phaethon now asks to be allowed to drive the sun chariot for a day . Helios tries to dissuade his son from this plan - but in vain. As the night comes to an end, Phaethon mounts his father's precious and richly decorated sun chariot. The four-team races off and soon gets out of control. Phaethon leaves the daily route between heaven and earth and triggers a catastrophe of universal proportions.
Ovid reports:
“Wherever the earth is highest, it is seized by fire, it gets cracks and cracks and withers because the juices have been withdrawn from it. The grass turns gray, the tree burns along with its leaves, and the dry seed field provides food for its own downfall [...] Large cities are perishing with their walls, and the fire is burning whole countries with their peoples. "
Only Zeus , called for help by mother earth, puts an end to the chaos and hurls lightning. The chariot is smashed and the charioteer Phaethon falls into the depths, where he ends up dead in the Eridanus River . His sisters, the Heliaden , cry for him and are turned into poplars on the bank , from which the tears drip down in the form of the plant resin known as amber . Even the Ligurian King Cycnus (or Kyknos ), a relative of Phaethon and his lover, rushes inconsolable. He is turned into a swan by Apollo out of pity (Latin cycnus and cygnus ).
According to Ovid, the inscription on the tombstone reads:
“Phaethon, the driver of his father's car, rests here; although he could not hold him, he died as one who dared great things. "
reception
The motif of the "fall of Phaethon" was often taken up in art, for example by Peter Paul Rubens , Jacopo Tintoretto and Michelangelo in his drawings of the same name . As a warning of arrogance or overestimation, it is not infrequently found in princely rooms and upper-class ballrooms; a ceiling painting by Georg Pencz is an early example of painting in German art.
Jean-Baptiste Lully composed the tragédie lyrique Phaëton based on a libretto by Philippe Quinault , which premiered on January 6, 1683 in Versailles .
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf composed his Symphony No. 2 in D major The Fall of Phaёtons
Camille Saint-Saëns composed a symphonic poem Phaethon (1873).
One of the 6 Metamorphoses after Ovid for oboe, op. 49, composed by Benjamin Britten , is entitled Phaeton.
The VW Phaeton has its name from the body shape Phaeton , which can have their name from the carriage type Phaeton has. In contrast to the Audi A8, which is also offered by the VW Group, the sales figures fell short of expectations, so that the term Phaethon was transferred to the car model as a symbolic failure in articles.
Son of Eos
Phaeton, son of Eos and Cephalos , with whom she spent the nights at the bottom of the ocean (Hesiod), is the morning star ( Venus ) (Gunkel 1895). The word means "shiny, shining". He was kidnapped by Aphrodite (Hesiod, Theogony 986). Grelot (1956, RHR 149) equates him with Eosphoros , the son of Eos and Astraios (Hesiod, Theogonie 378). It has a connection to Isaiah 14: 12-15, where the morning star is commonly associated with Lucifer .
Interpretation as a cosmic catastrophe
Already Plato in Timaeus had the priests in the Egyptian Sais say to Solon in Athens :
For whatever is told among you that Phaïton, the son of Helios, once got into his father's carriage and, because he did not know how to drive on his father's path, burned everything on the earth and was struck by lightning himself, That sounds like a fable, but the real thing about it is the changed movement of the heavenly bodies circling the earth and the destruction of everything that is on earth by much fire, which occurs after the passage of certain long periods of time ...
Goethe used the two fragments of the lost Phaeton tragedy of Euripides, which Gottfried Hermann sent him in July 1821 and which Karl Wilhelm Göttling translated for him, for an unfinished “attempt to restore from fragments”. In this connection he referred to the message in Aristotle 's Meteorologica that some of the Pythagoreans had called the Milky Way the orbit on which the stars fell when Phaetons fell, from which it follows “that the ancients did the fall of the meteor stones with the fall of Phaetons Thinking about linking. ”Following on from this, the geologist Wolf von Engelhardt came to the conclusion in 1979 that the myth describes a natural disaster.
In 2010, some amateur archaeologists believed that they recognized the legend of Phaeton's fall as a memory of an alleged meteorite impact in Chiemgau . The specialist science rejects such hypotheses.
The legend is also interpreted catastrophically by Immanuel Velikovsky in his work Worlds in Collision.
literature
- Hartmut Böhme : Phaeton, Prometheus and the limits of flight. In: Wolf R. Dombrowsky , Ursula Pasero (Ed.): Science, literature, catastrophe. Festschrift for the sixtieth birthday of Lars Clausen. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1995, ISBN 3-531-12785-3 , pp. 35-52.
- Siegmar Döpp : The tears of Phaethon's sisters turned to amber. The Phaethon myth in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In: Michael Ganzelewski, Rainer Slotta (Ed.): Bernstein. Tears of the Gods (= publications from the German Mining Museum Bochum. 64). Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Bochum 1996, ISBN 3-921533-57-0 , pp. 1-8.
- Hermann Gunkel : Creation and Chaos in Primeval and End Times. A study of the history of religion on Gen 1 and Ap Joh 12. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1895, ( digitized version ).
- Linda-Marie Günther : A new automobile called “Phaethon” ( Memento from June 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) .
- Christiane Hansen: Transformations of the Phaethon myth in German literature (= Spectrum literary studies. 29). de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-028986-2 (also: Freiburg (Breisgau), university, dissertation, 2010).
- Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp , Stefan Rebenich (eds.): Phaethon: A myth in antiquity and modernity. Steiner, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-515-09415-3 .
- Brigitte Jacoby: Studies on the iconography of the Phaeton myth. University of Bonn 1971, (Bonn, University, dissertation, 1971).
- Georg Knaack : Phaethon . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 3.2, Leipzig 1909, Col. 2175-2202 ( digitized version ).
- John W. McKay: Helel and the Dawn-Goddess. A re-examination of the myth in Isaiah XIV 12-15. In: Vetus Testamentum. Vol. 20, No. 4, 1970, ISSN 0042-4935 , pp. 451-464, doi : 10.2307 / 1516469 .
- David Nelting, Isabel von Ehrlich: Phaëthon. In: Maria Moog-Grünewald (Ed.): Mythenrezeption. The ancient mythology in literature, music and art from the beginnings to the present (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 5). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2008, ISBN 978-3-476-02032-1 , pp. 571-577.
- Dirk Schlinkert: From Phaethon to Volkswagen Phaeton. Myth, carriage, automobile. In: Martin Korenjak , Stefan Tilg (Hrsg.): The ancient world in contemporary everyday culture (= Pontes. 4 = Comparanda. 9). Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-7065-4350-7 , pp. 303-314.
- Sonja Martina Schreiner: Phaet (h) on - multilingual. Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariäs “Der Phaeton” (1754–1772) and Heinrich Gottfried Reichard's Phaethontis libri quinque (1780) (= European University Theses. Series 18: Comparative Literature. Vol. 113). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2005, ISBN 3-631-53465-5 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Plato, Timaeus 22c – d. (Greek); German based on the translation by Franz Susemihl from 1856 (with "Phaïton") at zeno.org .
- ↑ Narrated by Hyginus , Fabulae 154 ; see. Carl Robert : s: The Phaethonsage at Hesiod (1883)
- ↑ Bilingual Latin-German at gottwein.de .
- ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses 2,210–216; Translation Michael von Albrecht : Ovid. Metamorphoses. Reclam, Stuttgart 2015.
- ^ Ovid, Metamorphosen 2,327 f .; Translation Michael von Albrecht: Ovid. Metamorphoses. Reclam, Stuttgart 2015.
- ↑ To Phaethon of Euripides . In: Goethe's works. Complete edition last hand. Volume 46. Cotta 1833. p. 46 books.google
- ^ Phaethon . In: Goethe's works. Complete edition last hand. Volume 46. Cotta 1833, p. 29 books.google
- ↑ Meteorologica I VIII LCL 397: 58-59., Loebclassics.com
- ↑ Euripides' Phaethon, once more . In: Goethe's works. Complete edition last hand. Volume 46. Cotta 1833. p. 54 books.google
- ↑ Wolf von Engelhardt: Phaethon's fall - a natural event? Meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences , Math.-naturw. Class, born 1979, 2nd treatise. Berlin 1979.
- ↑ Barbara Rappenglück, Michael A. Rappenglück, Kord Ernstson, Werner Mayer, Andreas Neumair, Dirk Sudhaus, Ioannis Liritzis (2010): The fall of Phaethon: a Greco-Roman geomyth preserves the memory of a meteorite impact in Bavaria (south-east Germany) . In: Antiquity 84, 428-439
- ↑ Gerhard Doppler, Erwin Geiss, Ernst Kroemer, Robert Traidl (2011): Response to “The fall of Phaeton: a Greco-Roman geomyth preserves the memory of a meteorite impact in Bavaria (south-east Germany) by Rappenglueck et al. (Antiquity 84) “ In: Antiquity 85, 274-277