Another treatment of the myth had been delivered earlier by Aeschylus in his lost play Heliades ("daughters of the Sun"), whose content and plot are even more fragmentary and obscure.

Euripides' version of the myth was set in a mortal landscape, with Phaethon nominally the son of the Oceanid nymph Clymene by her lawful husband and putative father of her children Merops, king of the far-eastern land of Aethiopia, but in truth her product of an illicit affair with Helios.

[6] Another explanation is that Aphrodite had planned Phaethon's death from the beginning, as a revenge against his father who revealed her extramarital affair with Ares to her husband Hephaestus.

Clymene orders the slave girls to hide the body from Merops and laments Helios' role in his demise, noting that he is rightfully called "Apollo" (here understood to mean "destroyer") by the mortals who know the gods' true names.

[13] Of unknown position in the play is a fragment in which Clymene expresses hatred over the handy horned bow, and youths' pastime exercises, as they remind her of her slain son.