Knocked up by the gods
In the TLS Peter Stothard muses on a human-divine affair that led to a cataclysm and gave Euripides the subject of his Phaeton, which survives only in fragments.
Writing in around about 420BC, Euripides tells the ever fresh story of a woman who decided to keep her secret and, as an added attraction to the modern reader, caused some early global warming too.
Clymene was an eastern queen who one night took the fancy of Helios, god of the sun.
The resultant handsome son – such liaisons were reliably successful in that way – was the Phaethon who gave the play its name.
This boy thought his mother’s husband, Merops, was his father.
The father thought he had a fine upstanding son
All was fine and dandy.
Until, in Euripides’s Scene One the mother decides she has to tell her boy who his father really is…
Then Phaeton met his real dad, took his dad’s chariot out, and crashed it. He did get cars named after him. But is it a good idea to buy a car named after a terrible driver who died in a spectacular crash?
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 25th, 2009 at 17:38
I had a dream about Apollo back in college. It was bizarre.