![]() Pulling in nearly $400 million US in revenue within two months of its release, the game has proved highly popular as well as profitable. ![]() The trigger for my fascination, as I mentioned at the outset, is a game named Genshin Impact.įor those of you who have never heard of it: Genshin Impact is an action role-playing game released in 2020 by the Chinese video game company Mihoyo. Like I said, the absence of Pantheon in my Classics education was inconspicuous, so it wasn’t as though I woke up one day with the urge to go down a rabbit hole in search of him. Up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know about any of these. The story of Phaethon ends with him falling into the Eridanus (a mythical river said to be somewhere in northern Europe).Īccording to Ovid, the myth of Phaethon was used to explain natural phenomena, such as the creation of amber, which came from his sisters’ tears also, certain extremely hot or cold barren areas of the Earth were said to be created by Phaethon when he drove the sun’s chariot either too close or too far away from Earth. ![]() He is eventually halted by Zeus, who stops this poor kid with his thunderbolt. Unable to dissuade Phaethon, Helios reluctantly agrees this decision results in havoc all over the Earth, as Phaethon loses control of the chariot pretty quickly. For one reason or another, probably to prove his divine lineage, Phaethon decides to find Helios, and asks to drive Helios’ chariot for one day. Phaethon was born of a union between Helios (the sun god) and the Oceanid Clymene. However, one thing to be glad of is that at least a coherent narrative can be strung together using what we do have. Phaethon (or Helios?) driving the chariot of the sun, detail from an Attic red figure crater, c. it makes one quite sad to think just how much we have lost. Since Diodorus Siculus (writing in the mid-1 st century BC) claims that the myth was used by many poets and authors, Library of History 5.23, in the context of explaining the origins of amber. ![]() Aside from these treatments, mentions of Phaethon in ancient works are mostly brief, and don’t differ much from each other. According to Diggle, this version was the most influential depiction of Phaethon’s myth. In terms of Roman literature, there is the Metamorphoses of Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18), whose account of this myth is presumably inspired to some extent by Euripides’ Phaethon. Euripides (c.480–406 BC) referred to the myth in his Hippolytus, and of course also wrote the play Phaethon. According to James Diggle’s introduction to Euripides’ Phaethon (Cambridge UP, 1970), the history of this myth in Classical literature can be condensed as such: Aeschylus (525/4–456 BC) wrote a play about the myth that is lamentably lost in the mists of time. Modern ignorance of Phaethon – or my lack of knowledge anyway – can perhaps be explained in part by the scarcity of surviving ancient works that touch on this myth. Sure, I can recognise that ‘Phaethon’ is a Greek name (Φαέθων), and (if I try hard enough) I might remember his association with the sun, but it doesn’t change the fact that, for the most part, Phaethon has been absent from my studies, and I haven’t even noticed. To add fuel to the fire (or perhaps pour water on dying embers): after studying Classics for the past four years, I know pitifully little about Phaethon.
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