With but scant attention to his father's advice, Phaethon gave the word to his steeds and dashed out of the gates which Aurora opened for him. And thus began a day which the gods on Olympus and the people on earth never forgot.
[Illustration: IN VAIN PHAETHON PULLED AT THE REINS.]
The horses easily perceived that some other hand than their master's held the lines, and they promptly became unmanageable. In vain Phaethon pulled at the reins; in vain he called the steeds by name. Up the sky they dashed, and then, first to the south, then to the north, they took their zigzag course across the heavens. What a sight it must have presented from below, this sun reeling crazily about the sky! Worst of all, however, the horses did not keep at the same distance from the earth. First they went down, down, until they almost touched the mountain tops. Trees, grass, wheat, flowers, all were scorched and blackened; and one great tract in Africa was so parched that nothing has since been able to grow upon it. Rivers were dried up, the snow on the mountain tops was melted, and, strangest of all, the people in the country over which the sun-chariot was passing were burned black. [Footnote: In this way the ancients explained the great desert of Sahara, and the dark color of the people of Africa.] Then, rising, the horses dragged the chariot so far from the earth that intense, bitter cold killed off much of the vegetation which the fierce heat had spared.
Poor Phaethon could do nothing but clutch the seat and shut his eyes. He dared not look down, lest he lose his balance and fall; he dared not look about him, for there were, in all parts of the heavens, the most terrifying animals—a great scorpion, a lion, two bears, a huge crab. [Footnote: These terrifying animals which Phaethon saw in the sky were the groups of stars, the constellations to which the ancients gave the names of animals etc. We know the Big Dipper, or Great Bear, for we may see it in the north any clear night.] Vainly he repented of his rashness; sadly he wondered in what way his death would come.
It came suddenly—so suddenly that poor Phaethon did not feel the pain of it. For Jupiter, when he saw the sun rocking about the heavens, did not stop to inquire who the unknown charioteer was; he knew it was not Apollo, and he knew the earth was being ruined—that was enough. Seizing one of his biggest thunderbolts, he hurled it with all his might, and Phaethon fell, flaming, from his lofty seat into the Eridanus River; while the horses, whom no thunderbolt could harm, trotted quietly back to their stalls. Clymene bewailed her son's death bitterly, and his companions, grieved that their taunts should have driven their comrade to his destruction, helped her to erect over his grave a stone on which were these words:
"Lies buried here young Phaethon, who sought
To guide his father's chariot of flame.
What though he failed? No death ignoble his
Who fared to meet it with such lofty aim."
Most of the Greek myths had meanings; they were not simply fairy stories. And while we have no means now of finding the meanings of some of them, many of them are so clear that we can understand exactly what the Greeks meant to teach by them. By far the most numerous are the so- called "nature myths"—myths which they invented to explain the happenings which they saw constantly about them in the natural world. Of these nature myths the story of Phaethon is one.
The ancients believed that drought was caused by the sun's coming too close to the earth; but how could Apollo, experienced driver of the sun- chariot, ever be so careless as to drive close enough to the earth to burn it? It was easy enough to imagine that the chariot, when it did such damage, was being driven by some reckless person who knew not how to guide it. But then arose the necessity of explaining Apollo's willingness to trust such a reckless person with so great a task; and what more likely than that the inexperienced charioteer was Apollo's beloved son, who had induced his father to grant his rash request? Gradually details were added, until the story took the form in which we have it.
As the drought of summer is often brought to a close by a storm which is accompanied by thunder and lightning, and which hides the light of the sun, so in the story Phaethon's ruinous drive is brought to an end by the thunderbolt of Jupiter; while the horses, trotting back home before their time, leave the world in comparative darkness.
It must not be supposed that some one just sat down one day and said, "I will tell a story which shall explain drought and the ending of drought." This story, like all the others, grew up gradually. Perhaps, one day, in time of drought, some one said to his neighbor, "The chariot of Apollo is coming too close to the earth," and perhaps his neighbor replied, "Some one who knows not how to guide the white horses is driving it." Such language might in time easily become the common language for describing times of drought; and so, at length, would grow up, out of what was at first merely a description, in figurative language, of a natural happening, a story, in dramatic form.