Despite Helios' fervent warnings and attempts to talk him out of it, counting the numerous dangers he would face in his celestial journey and reminding Phaethon that only he can control the horses, the boy is not dissuaded and does not change his mind.

His dead body falls into the river Eridanus, and his sisters, the Heliades, cry tears of amber and are turned to black poplar as they mourn him.

[18] By contrast, Euripides' version of the story, the now lost tragedy Phaethon, while similarly fragmentary, is much better preserved, with twelve fragments surviving covering some 400 lines of text.

Euripides seems to have made Aphrodite the bride of the unfortunate youth; if that is the case, then it would seem that Euripides combined the stories of two Phaethons, that of the son of Helios who drove his father's car and died, and that of Phaethon the son of Helios' sister Eos whom Aphrodite abducted to be a watchman of her shrines, and whom late antiquity writers described as a lover of the goddess, as suggested by Wilamowitz.

According to his account, Helios actually escorted his son on his doomed journey, riding on a horse named Sirius next to him and shouting instructions and advice on how to drive the car, an element not found in subsequent treatments of the myth.

[28][29][30] With Aeschylus being the earliest (as far as it can be determined) that Phaethon's story would have been known, the next mention possibly came from a lost work of Philoxenus of Cythera (435~434 – 380~379 BC), a dithyrambic poet.

Naming no mother, Palaphaetus speaks of Phaethon as a son of Helios who had the irrational desire to drive his father's chariot, but had no knowledge of how to handle the reins.

[33] While sailing up the Eridanus river on their way back, the Argonauts reach the outfall of the deep lake where Phaethon fell after he was struck with a lightning bolt.

During the day, the crew of the Argo was tormented by the nauseating stench from Phaethon's corpse, still smoldering after all this time, and at night they had to listen to the lament of his sisters, now turned into poplar trees and shedding tears of amber.

[20] Another possible inspiration of Ovid's version might have been Nicander, who is known to have written about Phaethon in some work, perhaps attested in the lost Heteroeumena (loosely translating into "transformations").

Apollo tried to talk him out of it by telling him that not even Jupiter (the king of the gods) would dare to drive it, as the chariot was fiery hot and the horses breathed out flames.

Even if you keep your course, and do not steer awry, you must still avoid the horns of Taurus the Bull, Sagittarius the Haemonian Archer, raging Leo and Lion's jaw, Scorpio's cruel pincers sweeping out to encircle you from one side, and Cancer's crab-claws reaching out from the other.

The horses veered from their course, scorching the Earth, burning the vegetation, bringing the blood of the Ethiopians to the surface of their skin and so turning it black, changing much of Africa into a desert, drying up rivers and lakes and shrinking the sea.

[38]Apollo, stricken with grief at his son's death, at first refused to resume his work of driving his chariot, but at the appeal of the other gods, including Jupiter who used threats, returned to his task.

[42] A scholiast on Homer's Odyssey provides a different parentage for Phaethon, making him the son of Helios and Rhodos instead (thus full brother to the Heliadae), here the daughter of Asopus, the river god.

[8] The element of Helios knowing what's in store for his child, but being unable to thwart it, is present in several tellings; Statius writes that "with tears did he warn the rejoicing youth of treacherous stars and zones that would fain not be o'errun and the temperate heat that lies midway between the poles; obedient was he and cautious, but he cruel Parcae would not suffer him to learn.

"[43] Valerius Flaccus gives attention to the wrecked chariot itself, and how Tethys, who is Phaethon's grandmother as well as the goddess who receives Helios in the western ocean as he sets, picks up the fragments of yoke and axle, and one of the horses too (Pyrois) who is fearful of a father's wrath.

[44] Cicero, another Roman author, describes Sol as being "tricked" into letting his son drive his chariot, expressing surprise and disbelief that a god could be deceived like that.

Being inexperienced, Phaethon drove the chariot too high, and it was fear that made him plunge into the Eridanus; when Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt, the Earth began to burn.

In the short dialogue, Zeus angrily berates Helios for letting his inexperienced son drive his chariot, which almost resulted in the world being destroyed.

Unlike other versions, Nonnus' is one of the few where Phaethon is a legitimate offspring of a married couple, with his motivation shifting from need to prove his parentage to him wanting to imitate his idolized father.

Phaethon nevertheless is not a bit discouraged by his worried father's words, and then pressures him more, as does Clymene; with great reluctance, Helios consents, and gives his son a very extensive and detailed speech about all the dangers and the hazards of the ride.

With a final warning from his father, Phaethon yokes the horses and ascends in the sky, as his mother Clymene cheerfully waves him goodbye, still unaware of the danger that awaits her son.

A very common element of the story is that Phaethon's sisters, the Heliades, mourn his death by the river and transform into black poplars, shedding tears of amber for their lost brother.

[31][52] Their number and names vary; a scholiast on Homer gives an alternative parentage where Phaethon and his three sisters (Phaethusa, Lampetia and Aegle) are the children of Helios and Rhodos, here the daughter of Asopus.

[54] The Odyssey scholiast writes that Zeus, feeling pity for them, changed them into the amber-crying poplar trees, and allowing them to retain the memories of their old lives and sorrows.

[7] On one of the earliest extant artistic attestations of the myth, a cast taken from an Arretine mould now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,[63] Phaethon is shown fallen from the car, a wheel lying next to him while another is being collected by the water goddess Tethys, his grandmother, as Valerius Flaccus wrote.

[29] The myth of father and son was immortalized in Corinth (where Helios had a significant cult), where Pausanias describes two gilded chariots, one carrying Phaethon the other Helios, adorning a gateaway near Corinth's market: On leaving the market-place along the road to Lechaeum you come to a gateway, on which are two gilded chariots, one carrying Phaethon the son of Helius (Sun), the other Helius himself.

[84] When 1 Ceres and 2 Pallas – the first asteroids – were discovered, astronomer Heinrich Olbers suggested that they were fragments of a much larger hypothetical planet, which was later named Phaethon.

However, the 'Phaeton hypothesis' has been superseded by the accretion model, in which the asteroid belt represented the remainder of the protoplanetary disk that never formed a planet, due to the interference of the gravity of Jupiter.