Episode 72J – Holy Cow – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 72J Show Notes

Source: Greek Mythology

This week on MYTH: beef. It’s what’s for dinner. You’ll see that you should really listen to magical warnings, that stealing from gods is a bad idea, and that there’s never a good time for a nap. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll discover why deadbeat dads and magical horses are a deadly combination. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 72J, “Holy Cow”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
When we left the story last time, we’d picked up just after the end of the Trojan War. . Things had gone bad almost immediately, and wise Odysseus had led his men into disaster after disaster: getting bloodied after raiding a random city for shits and giggles, getting his men stoned on premium lotus, getting men killed in the home of Polyphemus the Cyclops and then getting cursed by said Cyclops because Odysseus was too prideful not to reveal his real name, and almost getting home after some help from the King of the Winds only to get blown off course again because his men can’t stop being greedy while Odysseus naps. Odysseus got most of his men eaten by cannibal giants, leaving only the soldiers on a single black ship alive to journey on. They met the demigoddess witch Circe, who turned half of the Ithacans into pigs before being seduced by Odysseus. After a year-long fling, Odysseus took a portal to the Underworld for some advice from a dead seer. He putzed around with dead heroes for a bit before returning, getting more advice from Circe, then taking the dangerous path home. Per the witch’s advice, Odysseus had his men tie him to the mast so he could safely listen to the song of the sirens as they sailed past. That went shockingly well, which quickly turned brutal as they found themselves threading the needle between dual disasters Scylla and Charybdis, losing six more men. His men led a minor mutiny, forcing Odysseus to land on the island of the sun god, despite warnings not to by both Circe and Tiresias.
The Greek sailors spent a peaceful, restful night on the lush paradise of Helios, the sun god. They set up camp near a sweet-tasting spring, built a fire, and began to cook dinner. After everyone had eaten, the assembled Ithacans mourned their six dead comrades that Scylla had plucked from the deck and eaten alive. The tears were still wet on their cheeks as sleep found them.
In the deepest, darkest part of the night, just as the stars were starting to wheel towards the horizon but before the sun began to lighten the sky, Zeus struck at the beleaguered soldiers once more. As always, sky gods are assholes and Zeus piled up stormclouds on the horizon, then sent a screaming gale howling across the open sea and onto the lonely beach of the sun god’s island. The men woke in the teeth of the storm and raced to secure their ship from its clutches. To keep it from being driven out to sea, stranding them to their dooms, Odysseus ordered the ship dragged into a nearby cave near the shore where the nymphs that tended Helios’ flocks often went to dance.
Once the ship was safe, Odysseus called a meeting. “Whew! Zeus really hurled a doozy at us this time. Fortunately, we’re safe and dry inside this cozy cave and we’ve got plenty of food and drink on our ship. We’ll just hang out here and ride this out, no harm no foul. I need you to remember one thing, no matter what – keep your hands off the sun god’s flocks! Helios can see everything, even if you think you’re alone. Don’t risk his wrath.”
Things were fine, at first. The men were happy to be off the sea for a while, especially with that terrible storm howling over the waves outside. But the storm dragged on. And on. And on. For a solid month, the terrible South Wind raged nonstop over the island, never letting up and never shifting to a less bitter wind. As long as the food held out, the men were content to leave the sheep and cattle and such alone. The storm continued to swirl outside, and the food began to run out, forcing the Greeks to begin hunting and fishing wild game. With bows and twisted hooks, they caught birds and fish and small furry animals to try and soothe increasingly grumbly bellies. Odysseus could see that things were going from bad to worse and so, before things could get desperate, he set out alone into the island’s interior to look for other options.
It was clear to him that the gods were still very angry with them and his only hope was to try and appease them, to pray for one god or another to take pity on them and show them the way home. Once he was clear of the crew, Odysseus found a secluded spot that was mostly protected from the rain, washed his hands in a ritualistic cleansing, and began to pray. In response, the Olympians sent gentle, irresistible sleep to Odysseus, and he fell gently to the soft earth.
Which is why no one was around to stop Eurylochus when he once more began to stir up trouble. “Odysseus isn’t around right now, so listen to me my comrades in arms, my brothers in hardship. Death sucks any way you slice it, but slow starvation on a lonely island has to be the worst. We have salvation within our grasp if we only have the courage to seize it! You’ve all heard the soft lowing of the cattle that roam this island. We just have to drive a few of the bigger ones away from the herd to end our hunger. As long as we slaughter them to the gods, everything will be fine! And what about Helios you ask? Easy – when we make it home to Ithaca once more, we’ll build him a super dope temple, huge and glittering and stuffed to the gills with dazzling gifts. He’ll be cool with it, I’m sure. Even if not, even if he and the other terrible gods decide to rain down doom upon our heads, I’d rather die at sea with a sword in my hands than starving and whimpering in despair. I’d rather go out with one deep gulp of death than to die by inches here on this goddamned island!”
Urged on by their growing hunger, the Greeks cheered Eurylochus’ speech. They all knew that Odysseus would never agree, so they rushed out of the cave on the instant to go and seize the sun god’s finest cattle for themselves. It wasn’t hard to follow the insistent sound of lowing to the sleek cattle that grazed near their cave hideout. Not far from the beached ship, Eurylochus and the other Ithacans found the massive longhorn cows. The men formed a loose ring around the cattle and raised ecstatic prayers to the proud Olympian gods. From nearby oak trees, they plucked fresh green leaves for an improvised rite (since the white barley they would typically use was long since devoured). Once their prayers were complete, the men slaughtered the cattle, skinned them, and cut out the huge thigh bones as an offering. Per the customs of the Greeks, they wrapped the thighbones in glistening fat and topped with thin strips of flesh. They had no more wine to anoint the sacrifices, so they made their libations with water instead, broiling the entrails. They burned the bones to the gods and then hacked the rest of the corpses to pieces and began to roast them on spits.
It was only then, once the deed was done, that Odysseus awoke again, alone in the island’s interior. Stretching out the stiffness from his bones, Odysseus began to head back towards the ship. As he neared the cave however, he caught the enticing aroma of roasted meat on the wind, smokey and delicious. It smelled like heaven, but Odysseus knew that it spelled disaster. “Father Zeus! Proud Olympians who never die! You lulled me into a fatal sleep while my men blundered into disaster. I could have stopped them. I could have saved them! Why?”
Even as Odysseus raced towards the scene of the crime, Lampetie (nymphly daughter of Helios) raced to tell her father what had happened to his beloved herd. As Circe and Tiresisas had warned, Helios…didn’t take the news well. Befitting a god of divine fire, Helios flew into a burning rage when he heard. “Father Zeus! Proud Olympians who never die! Punish these wicked mortals! This cruel, selfish crew of Odysseus, son of Laertes, they have blasphemed and murdered my sweet cows. Every day, every damned day as I climb the starry skies and wheel my scorching chariot across the sky to bring warmth and light to the mortals on earth, I look down on my cows and their happy lowing brings peace to my sweaty, aching muscles. Either they pay for their sacrilegious butchery in blood or I go down into the House of the Dead and blaze my light for them, leaving the mortal world to drown in darkness!”
Zeus is a proud bastard, and he doesn’t always take well to having a lesser deity make demands of him, but he also had something of a personal vendetta against Odysseus by this point. The mortal just kept refusing to die like he was supposed to! Remember, Zeus had helped to orchestrate the Trojan War in the first place to thin the ranks of mortal and demigod heroes among the Greeks. At this point, Odysseus is one of the few surviving heroes left, so Zeus is more than happy to placate Helios with a promise of slaughter. “Don’t you worry Helio, just keep shining on the mortal world and on the deathless gods of Olympus. As soon as the mortals who have wronged you take their ship back out onto the wine-dark sea, I’ll smash it to splinters with one white-hot thunderbolt. Ka-boom!”
Odysseus was, of course, not privy to this conversation (although he later hears it third hand from someone we’ll meet soon), but he was no one’s fool. He’d had two separate warnings about the fate that lay in store for his crew on this island and it didn’t take magical powers to guess what his men were up to without him. The last time he had fallen asleep at a critical juncture, the sailors had opened the bag of the winds against his orders and ruined their chance of getting home. Now, they were hungry and unsupervised, and he’d bet dollars to donuts that Eurylochus was giving a lot of sensible-sounding reasons to disobey orders.
Odysseus raced across the island until he reached the cave near the shore and, sure enough, the smell of roasting meat turned out to come from, you guessed it, roasting meat. With a voice that was used to bellowing orders over the din of battle, Odysseus ripped into each and every one of his men in turn, lashing out with a string of blistering curses in the time-honored tradition of commanding officers everywhere. Of course, none of this changed the fact that the sacred cows were already very much dead. The damage was done and all that was left was to wait for their doom to come.
As if Odysseus’ tirade wasn’t enough to drive the point home, the gods sent some truly disturbing signs to make their displeasure known. The bloody flayed skins of the cows began to quiver and then crawl across the ground in an eldritch, Lovecraftian fashion. Everyone fell silent to stare in horror at the awful sight of the raw skin creeping along without a creature inside it, so everyone heard what came next. The butchered meat, both the still-raw hunks and the seared flesh currently cooking over the flames, began to moo. It was quiet at first, but the gentle lowing soon grew to agonized bellows of terrified animals in agony.
And yet none of that stopped the Greek soldiers from feasting on the haunted meat for six more days. Seriously. They fucking ate the meat that was screaming at them from beyond the grave. I mean, I get that these guys have been through a lot, but my reaction to being haunted by the bloody remains of a corpse I definitely made would not be to shrug and go about my day. I guess they figured that, haunted or not, the meat was still tasty, they were still hungry, and the storm was still raging outside so why not? On the seventh day after the slaughter, the winds finally quieted down and the sun came out. Odysseus was anxious to get the fuck away from the accursed place and so they dragged the boat back out into the sea at once and made for open ocean.
Unfortunately, Zeus had not forgotten his promise to Helios and, both being sky gods, it wasn’t like the Greeks were safe just because they were away from the island. Anywhere they went under the sky, they could be found. Zeus waited to strike until the black ship was in the deep ocean, with nothing but empty waves on every horizon. A vicious new storm literally appeared out of a clear blue sky, turning the water around them to a deep, forbidding blackness.
As if someone had opened a gate, screaming winds came tearing out of the west in an instant. The sudden rage snapped the ropes holding the mast in place, and it crashed to the deck, smashing the skull of the helmsman to a bloody pulp and throwing his body into the air like a ragdoll. Before his bones could come to rest on the deck, a lightning bolt crackled through the air to strike the flailing ship. The reek of ozone mingled with the brimstone char of the mangled boat and the dying ship turned broadside to the towering waves. Raging whitecaps swamped the deck, smashing into the hapless Greeks and dragging their soon-to-be-corpses through the broken wood and out to sea.
The surging storm stripped the plankings from the ship’s keel and snapped the mast clean off the deck along with all of the men. All, that is, except for Odysseus. With a strength born of desperation, he managed to seize a long backstay made of bull’s hide leather and used it to last the mast to the keel. Nearly drowning with the sheer volume of spray in the air, Odysseus managed to ride his makeshift raft through the teeth of the storm. He didn’t have even a semblance of control however, and was driven by the gale to wherever the winds wanted.
At last, the West Wind exhausted itself and died down, but it was immediately replaced by the howling South Wind instead. The waves were not quite as horrendous as they had been, allowing Odysseus to look out over the raging sea to where he was headed. A familiar pair of ominously towering crags were rising up from the sea, driving Odysseus’ heart into his stomach. Shit. The storm had driven him back the way they’d come and he was about to sail back into the deadly space between Scylla and Charybdis (from back in Episode 72I). The good news was that his rudderless raft was drifting away from Scylla’s razor-sharp teeth. The bad news was that this was because he was being dragged towards the equally deadly maelstrom of Charybdis.
By chance or fate, Odysseus arrived just as Charybdis was beginning her next cycle of drinking down the sea. This brought his flimsy raft to within mere feet of the little spit of land she was anchored beneath, complete with its totally normal fig tree. The totally normal fig tree with its spreading branches that swayed overhead. Odysseus knew he would only get one shot at this. He crouched down, hoping desperately that he didn’t lose his balance on the wildly bucking raft, and then leapt. Reaching fingers grasped rough wood, and Odysseus clung to the branch overhead for dear life. Beneath his feet, the sea dropped down into its deadly funnel, taking his raft with it. Only death lay there now.
The desperate man looked around. The little island where the tree grew was too far away for him to hope to be able to swing to. The branch that he clung to was thin and slick, and he didn’t think he’d be able to climb up into the branches without slipping and falling. He swallowed in fear. No way to get good footing beneath him and no way to clamber into the branches above him. His one flimsy hope was to cling on to this branch until Charybdis finished swallowing the sea and began to belch it back up. With luck, his raft would bob back to the surface then, and he could ride the roiling water away from the deadly duo and out to the dubious safety of open water. Of course, that might mean drifting back to the island of the sirens, and he didn’t have any beeswax to stop his ears this time. Odysseus shook his head. One almost-certain doom at a time.
Like a strange bat, he hung there from the fig tree until his fingers ached and his arms burned. Sweat dripped from his pores as he roasted in the merciless sun, stinging his eyes. Finally, as the sun began to dip towards the horizon again (a time Odysseus describes as the hour when a judge decides he’s done hearing lawsuits from brash little assholes and heads home for supper), the whirlpool faded. As he had hoped, his makeshift raft burst out of the sea and floated close to his exhausted form. It took real effort to force his fingers, which had long ago cramped into useless claws, to let go of the branch that had been his salvation. Limb flailing wildly, Odysseus crashed into the sea and began to swim for the nearby raft. Once aboard, he rowed desperately away from the dread cave high above where Scylla waited for her next meal. Either Zeus blinded her eyes to him or he never quite came into range of her long necks, but he made it safely away from the dual dreads.
Luck stayed with him, and he didn’t drift towards the sirens once he was past Scylla and Charybdis. That, however, was as far as his luck stretched. For nine days, Odysseus floated on the open sea without food or water. He roasted and burnt in the pitiless sun beating down on him from a cloudless sky until he went a little delirious. On the tenth, he washed ashore on the island of Ogygia (in modern-day Gozo, a part of Malta). Naturally, this island is not uninhabited. It is the home of Calypso, a nymph who is usually said to be the daughter of the Titan Atlas and the nymph Pleione (although both Hesiod and a Homeric ode to Demeter mention her as being a daughter of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys.
Like Circe, she was a beautiful but isolated woman, and she almost immediately falls in love with Odysseus (though in this case, it was likely while she was nursing him back to health after finding him washed up on her beach, starving and delirious). Calypso decides that Odysseus makes ideal husband material and decides to keep him with her on Ogygia forever as her immortal spouse. With her physical charms and her captivating singing voice, she kept him with her in her deep caverns (and yes, that’s probably a deliberate innuendo) for seven long years. Incidentally, this is where the Odyssey opens – Odysseus lounging on the shores of Ogygia and beginning to long for his home and his wife (who he hasn’t seen in nearly two decades at this point).
By now, all of the gods had moved on from their feud with Odysseus except for Poseidon, who can really hold a grudge when he wants to. He still hated Odysseus and wanted him to suffer for blinding his son, Polyphemus the Cyclops. It was largely due to his baleful influence that Odysseus languished on Calypso’s isle for so very long. But at long last, Poseidon one day has something more pressing than vengeance to occupy him. In the distant land of Ethiopia (which was believed to be the distant kingdom south of Egypt and at the very limit of the inhabited world), something was happening. This mythical place was said to be so far away that they were a people split in two – one part of the kingdom at the place where Helios rose into the sky in the morning and the other at the place where he descended to earth at night. There, a great offering of hundreds of bulls and rams was being made in Podeidon’s honor during a massive feast. Poseidon, being as egotistic as any of the Olympians, headed out to this distant place to bask in their glories.
The rest of the Olympians were still very much at home and sitting in council. As was his right as king of the gods, Zeus spoke first. True to form, he complained about how shitty it was that mortals complained about the gods so much. His specific beef was with Aegisthus who had (as we saw back in Episode 26O) helped murder Agamemnon (his cousin) as part of his affair with Agamemnon’s wife and had in turn been murdered by Agamemnon’s son Orestes. In Homer’s version, Hermes had been dispatched years before all of this happened to warn Aegisthus not to hop into bed with Clytemnestra and most definitely not to murder Agamemnon, but he hadn’t listened and had met his doom just as he had been warned (which has only recently gone down at this point in the narrative). Zeus was all kinds of pissed that the bastard hadn’t heeded the warning of the gods. Like, they told him straight out what not to do and the asshole went and did exactly that!
Athena, goddess of wisdom and strategy, had a real soft-spot for our man Odysseus. She was a real sucker for clever tacticians, and that was definitely Odysseus. She saw an opening here to help the mortal out, what with Poseidon being out of the picture for the moment. “You’re absolutely right, father! He earned his grisly death in full, and everyone who acts that way should get the same. I have to say that I feel bad for poor Odysseus though. He’s been tossed on the stormy sea for years and even now wastes away on a desolate island in the remotest corner of the ocean, far from his home and family. It sucks that he’s being held captive by the daughter of that wicked traitor Atlas who, in spite of his tears, keeps trying to seduce a man who’s just not that into her. He longs for home, straining his sight on the beach for even a glimpse of smoke from his homeland. Aside from home, the only thing he hopes for is his own death.” Odysseus had done more than his share of raping and kidnapping and enslaving over the years, so it’s a little harder for me to find much sympathy with him for having the roles reversed here (although I’m not really on Calypso’s side either). Basically, pretty much all of the characters we’ve met so far suck as people/deities. On the plus side, some better characters are on the horizon and will make their entrance in the next episode.
“Look at the pitiful man, father. Can you not find some compassion for the man in your lofty heart? I mean, he did burn some pretty sweet sacrifices to you beside his ships back at Troy. Why are you so dead set against this mortal?” Zeus shot his daughter a withering look. “Are you fucking serious? You shouldn’t let such nonsense slip out of your teeth. Of course I haven’t forgotten Odysseus. How could I? He’s one of the wisest men alive and, unlike a lot of those assholes nowadays, he actually honors the gods with proper sacrifices. It’s my brother Poseidon who wants him dead, not me. He’s still not over the whole blinding of his son Polyphemus thing yet. He can’t quite kill Odysseus, much as he’d like to – fate has other things in store for him.” Zeus considered for a moment. “You know, you might be right. Maybe it’s time for us to put our heads together and figure out how to get Odysseus back home at last. Poseidon will probably get over his anger once it’s all said and done.” Right, because the Olympians are so renowned for their compassion and forgiving natures. “More importantly, he won’t have much choice against the collective will of the rest of us.”
Athena smiled at her father to reinforce that this was all definitely his idea and definitely not something she had skillfully maneuvered him into doing. “How smart you are, father! If that is your will, then we should send Hermes down to Ogygia to tell Calypso about your decree. Meanwhile, I’ll head to Ithaca to give a little hope to Odysseus’ son. He’s had kind of a rough go of it, what with his father leaving for war when he was an infant and never returning but also never being definitively dead. He could use the encouragement.” So saying, Athena rushed off to the mortal world before Zeus could change his mercurial mind. Although he doesn’t know it yet, Odysseus is finally about to be permitted to make the final leg of his journey home, though much has changed in his long, long absence. We’re going to leave him there for a little while, which means it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s god is Helios.
As we saw briefly in the main tale, Helios was the sun god. In later years, he would often become conflated with Apollo but in the Homeric literature such as the Odyssey, they were distinctly different gods. He’s a relatively minor god whose primary job was to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky each day (though he also functioned as the patron deity of sight and a guardian of sacred oaths). Helios mostly pops up as a fairly minor character in other people’s stories, though he does have a few of his own.
According to Pindar, Zeus and the other gods got together to divide up the earth amongst themselves as their domains and sacred places. Helios, who was busy driving the sun, missed the meeting and thus also missed out on getting any land of his own. He was justifiably pissed off about this oversight and Zeus, in a rare fit of reasonableness, offered to get everyone back together to divide things up again. Helios, who had incredible vision as the god of sight, had a better idea – he had just seen a brand new island emerging from the depths of the sea and he asked that it be given to him. Zeus, happy to not have to wrangle the other gods again, readily agreed. Helios named it Rhodes after his current lover Rhode, who was the daughter of Poseidon and Aphrodite.
Apart from the incident with Odysseus’ men raiding his cattle, by far the most famous story about Helios involves his son Phaethon. The boy is always a son of Helios, but his mother is alternately Rhode, Prote, or Clymene although the latter is the most common choice. The most famous version today comes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis; modern scholars have pointed out that this account seems to echo the version from Euripdes’ play Phaethon, although only fragments of that work have survived. As was usually the case with demigods, Phaethon was raised by his mother Clymene. She was an Oceanid, one of the 3,000 daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys (who came up briefly in the Glaucus story from last episode and might also be Calypso’s parents), so Phaethon had no trouble believing her when she told him that his father was the sun god, which was why he was a deadbeat dad. Things were fine and dandy until his frenemy Epaphus, son of Zeus and Io, bullied Phaethon for shits and giggles when they were both early teens or so. He laughed at Phaethon’s claim of Helios as his father. “Seriously? You’d believe anything that came out of that woman’s mouth, wouldn’t you. Pssh. Your dad’s not the sun god – your mom probably just doesn’t know who your real dad is and made up a ridiculous story to make you feel better.” This from a boy who claimed Zeus, king of the gods, as his own father, so fuck that little asshat.
Phaethon had never questioned his parentage before, but this put a seed of doubt in his mind that wouldn’t go away. Unable to shake it, he went back home to ask Clymene for the truth. The real truth. She reassured Phaethon that Epaphus was just being a little shit and of course his dad was really Helios. In fact, you can ask him yourself if you’re so worried about it. There’s no indication in Ovid that this is anything but a sincere offer, but I can’t help but wonder if she was hoping that her son would just take her word for it rather than setting off to go and meet his dad in the flesh. He left Ethiopia (the mythical Greek version, not the modern country) and set off to the edge of the settled world where the Lord of the Day had his palace.
It was not an easy trek, but Phaethon had the enthusiasm of youth as well as the good fortune to be living in a mythical place near where the sun rose and set already. The Palace of the Sun eventually came into sight, and it was even more incredible and glittering and magnificent than anything Phaethon had imagined. The place had been carved by Haphaestus himself with intricate designs showing all manner of gods and beasts and men. It was an awe-inspiring sight, but Phaethon had other things on his mind and rushed immediately inside in search of Helios. He crossed the threshold of the gates, but found that the glittering light inside was too damned bright for him to go any farther. Helios sat on a throne encrusted with huge emeralds, flanked on both sides by incarnations of the concepts of Day, Month, Year, and the Hours on one side, and Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter on the other.
Helios saw the boy standing there at the gates, and he could see that, now that the kid wasn’t busy traveling, the totally reasonable fear of being where he was had begun to set in a little. “Why have you come here, Phaethon?” “My mother Clymene says that you’re my dad and…and I need to know if it’s true or if it’s just a story she made up to hide her shame. If you really are my father, I ask that you give me a token to prove that I really am your son beyond any shadow of a doubt.”
At this, Helios took off the shining circlet of pure light from his head and went to hug his son. “Your mother told you true – you are my son, Phaethon. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to see you before now, but driving the chariot of the sun is kind of a full-time gig. Tell you what – to make it up to you, I’ll give you whatever you want as proof. Name it, anything, and it’s yours. I swear it on the River Styx.” As I’ve mentioned before, oaths sworn on the Styx were unbreakable by the Olympians and often got them into trouble…which is exactly what’s about to happen.
“Anything? Cool! I know exactly what I want. Father, let me drive the chariot of the sun for one day. That’ll show everyone that I’m really your son (because I’ll be the sun, get it?) and give me one hell of a story to tell.” Well fuck. Helios immediately regretted swearing a completely open-ended promise, but now he was stuck. “Phaethon, you don’t know what you’re asking for here. I beg you to ask for anything else. This is the only thing I don’t want to give you. Seriously, anything else.” Stubbornly, Phaethon refused. “Please, my son, ask for something else. Driving the chariot is dangerous for anyone but me. Not even Zeus himself can wrangle those fiery horses, feet planted on the flaming chariot. If the lord of the lightning can’t do it, what chance do you have?
“The initial ascent is unbelievably steep and difficult, my son. Even fresh from a full night’s rest, the mighty steeds can barely make the climb. When you finally do reach the peak, the whole world is spread out beneath you as you ride across literally the highest point in existence. Even my divine heart quails slightly at the terrible visage, especially since the stars and the sky itself twist and turn around that point, wrenching the eyes. Tethys, who receives me and my horses into the waves each night, is always terrified that I’ll lose control one day and plummet from the highest heavens. Do you really think you can control the chariot through that shifting, twisting path? It’s not a pleasant road, with beauty and wonder on every side. No, it’s a deadly voyage, full of snares for the unwary and the deadly beasts of the constellations – Taurus the bull, Leo the lion, Cancer the crab, Scorpio the scorpion – all of them will come for you if you do this. Please my son, do not ask this of me. If nothing else, my fear for your safety should be proof that you really are mine.”
Phaethon hugged his father, but he refused to relent. He would drive the chariot of the sun. That was his wish, and he wouldn’t unwish it. The time for the next solar ride was approaching, meaning that Helios was out of time. Bound by his oath, he relented and took his son with him to the stables. There stood the chariot, also crafted by mighty Hephaestus and built from solid gold, though with spokes of pure silver and a layer of precious stones encrusting the yoke to make the light dance and sparkle across it. Aurora the dawn spread her purple light across the sky and it was time. Helios ordered the Hours to yoke the horses to the chariot. The ambrosia-fed animals came, snorting flames as they walked.
Helios anointed his son with an oil to protect him from the incredible, searing heat of the chariot then set the circlet of the sun’s rays on his head. “If you won’t change your mind, at least heed my advice. Don’t use the whip any more than absolutely necessary and be as forceful as you can be with the reigns. The steeds won’t be hard to get moving, but they are nearly impossible to stop if they get a full head of steam up. Make sure you follow the arcing path and don’t drive straight through – avoid the South Pole on one side and the Great Bear on the other. Make sure you keep an even distance between the earth and the sky so that neither gets too hot or too cold. Fortune be with you my son. It is time.”
Phaethon, with the arrogance of youth, paid no heed whatsoever to his father’s obvious misgivings and dire warnings. He leapt excitedly into the chariot and took up the reigns, eager to be off. “Thanks, dad!” The winged horses of the sun, named Eous, Aethon, Pyrois, and Phlegon, snorted great gouts of flame and pawed at the gate and, as soon as Tethys let it fall, they leapt out of the palace and into a gallop.
The horses knew the way themselves and headed towards the initial ascent on their own. Phaethon, unprepared for the violent rush of their leap or the mighty beat of their great wings, lost control immediately. The chariot’s car began to bounce around behind the horses. The creatures realized then that the little shit holding the reigns had no idea what he was doing and was powerless to stop them from doing whatever the fuck they wanted. With a wild neigh, they left the beaten path and soared off into the wild blue yonder.
Phaethon seized the reins to try and pull them back on the path, but he immediately realized that A, he wasn’t strong enough for that and B, he had no clue where the path was any longer. The sun wandered south, near the pole he had been warned to avoid, and the great serpent that lived there began to wake. It was usually frozen into immobility near the constellation Triones (also known as the Pleiades), who went to bathe in the forbidden water that was usually far too cold for it. Startled by the snake, the horses leapt higher and higher, away from the surface, leaving the earth cold and icy.
Beneath him, Phaethon could see the earth receding farther and farther away and he realized that this had been a terrible mistake. He should never have touched the chariot. He was dragged up into the highest heavens, where the dread Scorpio stretched out his terrible tail, dripping with a potent venom. It coiled itself up to strike at the hapless mortal who, in his terror, finally dropped the reigns altogether.
The horses felt them fall on their backs and exploded away from the constellations into new places that had always been forbidden to them. Down, down they raced towards the swiftly rising earth, which grew larger at a terrifying pace. The freezing surface was now scorched by the rising flames of the diving chariot, burning away the trees and the grasses and even the rivers until nothing but sand was left behind (which was the origin of the Sahara desert that marked the edge of the inhabited world in the Greek cosmology). Cities perished and walls crumbled to dust beneath the searing heat of the falling sun. This horrible sight of men, women, and children being burned to ash as he dove towards them was too much for Phaethon, and he passed the fuck out.
Still the horses dove towards the earth, burning the ground so fiercely that cracks opened up clear into Hades itself, sending the light of day down into the sunless realm for the first time ever. By now, even the fish were trying to hide, diving down to the deepest depth of the ocean to escape the furnace above. Poseidon himself tried to go above the waves to do something about this wanton destruction, but even he could not withstand the literal heart of the sun and three times, he was forced back into the depths. Gaia, cracked and charred and in terrible pain, cried out to the heavens in an agonized, parched voice, asking what she had done to deserve this torment. She begged Zeus to do something if not for her or for his brother Poseidon, then for his own realm of the Heavens, which burned and smoked in the wake of the chariot’s path carved through it.
At this, Zeus decided he had to do something. All of this had happened incredibly swiftly, so he’s not being as reckless as it seems, given how much damage is done before he acts. Taking up one of his dread thunderbolts, Zeus took careful aim and then blasted the chariot out of existence. The raw force of the blast put out the flames on the earth. The immortal horses escaped and fled home, but Phaethon was not so lucky. He had been at the heart of the thunderbolt’s explosion, and he was blasted from the heavens to plummet towards the earth like a shooting star, crashing into the River Eridanos.
His charred, mangled body was recovered by his seven sisters the Heliades, who built a tomb for him, marked with his tragic end. “Here lies Phaethon, who drove his father’s chariot and fell from the sky, despite his best efforts.” His mother, Clymene, watched all of this from earth and she knew that her son was dead. She set off in search of his body, wandering through distant lands until she finally found his tomb, where she collapsed and wept. The Heliades were still there, standing vigil over Phaethon’s tomb and weeping endlessly. Four months they stood there, until they felt their bodies grow stiff and hard, their feet sinking into the earth as roots. Leaves began to sprout from their skin and they wailed out their mother’s name, begging for her help. The woman tried to save them, tugging on their transforming bodies in an attempt to free them from the trees they were becoming, but all she succeeded in doing was tearing open bleeding wounds. Their red blood soon turned to amber sap and they became poplar trees, weeping golden amber.
Phaethon’s friend and lover Cycnus, son of Sthenelus, watched all of this unfold as well. He left his kingdom of Liguria behind to go and mourn where the seven sisters now stood as trees. He too was transformed, becoming Cygnus the Swan, and was placed in the heavens as a new constellation. The next morning, Helios stood in dark clothes, bereft of all the sun’s rays. He was too depressed from losing his son to climb into the new chariot that Hephaestus had made, and the day passed with no sun, it’s light missing from the sky as though an eclipse lasted all day long. The other gods complained about Helios shirking his duties and Zeus, who loved finding reasons to use his thunderbolts, told Helios to get back on the job or else. And so, the next morning, he was back at it although now he uses the whip quite a bit more to vent his fury at the dread horses for getting his son killed.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, we’ll take a little detour back to Ithaca to find out how things have been going without Odysseus. You’ll see that the gods endorse murdering people for drinking all of your wine, that suspicious strangers should be trusted, and that it’s rude to show up at a party empty-handed. Then, in Gods and Monsters, it’s a story about a holy dildo. No, really. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.