Phaethon (mythology)

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Fall of Phaetons - Roman sarcophagus (1st century AD)
Peter Paul Rubens: The Fall of Phaethon , around 1604/1605 ( National Gallery of Art , Washington DC)
Simone Mosca, called Moschino: The fall of Phaethon , 16th century ( Bode-Museum Berlin)

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the earth is highest, it is seized by fire, it gets cracks and cracks and withers because the juices have been withdrawn from it.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

Web links

Commons : Phaethon  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Plato, Timaeus 22c – d. (Greek); German based on the translation by Franz Susemihl from 1856 (with "Phaïton") at zeno.org .
  2. ↑ Narrated by Hyginus , Fabulae 154 ; see. Carl Robert : s: The Phaethonsage at Hesiod (1883)
  3. ↑ Bilingual Latin-German at gottwein.de .
  4. ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses 2,210–216; Translation Michael von Albrecht : Ovid. Metamorphoses. Reclam, Stuttgart 2015.
  5. ^ Ovid, Metamorphosen 2,327 f .; Translation Michael von Albrecht: Ovid. Metamorphoses. Reclam, Stuttgart 2015.
  6. ↑ To Phaethon of Euripides . In: Goethe's works. Complete edition last hand. Volume 46. Cotta 1833. p. 46 books.google
  7. ^ Phaethon . In: Goethe's works. Complete edition last hand. Volume 46. Cotta 1833, p. 29 books.google
  8. ↑ Meteorologica I VIII LCL 397: 58-59., Loebclassics.com
  9. ↑ Euripides' Phaethon, once more . In: Goethe's works. Complete edition last hand. Volume 46. Cotta 1833. p. 54 books.google
  10. ↑ 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.
  11. ↑ 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
  12. ↑ 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