Faeton vozi sončni voz

Besedilo

Faeton vozi sončni voz

He steps into the light chariot with his youthful body, stands upright, and rejoices to touch the reins placed in his hands, thanking his reluctant father. Meanwhile Pyrois, Eous, and Aethon, the swift horses of the Sun, and Phlegon, the fourth, fill the air with fiery neighing and strike the barriers with their hooves. When Tethys, knowing nothing of her grandson’s fate, had drawn back the barriers and opened the boundless sky, they seized their course, and, moving their feet through the air, tore through the clouds before them; lifted on wings, they outstripped the east winds rising from the same quarter.

But the weight was light, not one the horses of the Sun could recognize: the yoke lacked its accustomed burden. As curved ships rock without their proper ballast and pitch unsteadily at sea through being too light, so the chariot, missing its usual load, leaps into the air, is tossed high, and seems as though it were empty. As soon as the team of four sensed this, they bolted, leaving the beaten track and abandoning their former order.

Phaethon himself is terrified: he neither knows how to turn the reins entrusted to him nor where the road lies; and even if he knew, he could not command them. Then for the first time the chilly Bears grew hot beneath the rays and vainly tried to plunge into the sea forbidden them; the Serpent, too, that lies nearest the icy pole, once sluggish with cold and feared by no one, grew warm, and the heat kindled an unfamiliar fury.

You too, Boötes, they say, fled in alarm, slow though you were and held back by your wagon. But when, from the summit of the heavens, unhappy Phaethon looked down at the earth lying far, far below, he turned pale, his knees shook with sudden terror, and darkness rose before his eyes amid that blaze of light. Now he wished he had never touched his father’s horses; now he regretted learning his descent and winning his request, now longed to be called Merops’ son. He is swept along like a ship driven by the headlong north wind, whose helmsman, overcome, has let go the helm and abandoned her to the gods and his prayers.

What can he do? Much of heaven lies behind him, and more before his eyes! He measures both in his mind, and now looks ahead toward the west, which fate will not let him reach, now back toward the east. Bewildered, not knowing what to do, he neither lets the reins go nor has strength to hold them, nor knows the horses’ names. In terror he also sees strange wonders scattered throughout the varied heavens, and the shapes of monstrous beasts.

There is a place where the Scorpion bends its claws into twin arcs, and with its tail and limbs curved out on either side stretches its body across the space of two signs. When the boy saw it, drenched in the sweat of black venom, threatening to wound him with its curving sting, his mind gave way, and in icy terror he dropped the reins. When the slack reins touched the horses’ backs, they swerved from their course, and with no one to check them raced through the air of an unknown region. Wherever impulse drove, there they rushed unchecked, striking the stars fixed high in heaven and dragging the chariot through trackless space.

Now they climb to the heights, now plunge down slopes and headlong paths, sweeping nearer the earth. The Moon marvels to see her brother’s horses running below her own, and the scorched clouds smoke. The highest places on earth are the first caught by the flames; the ground splits, opens in cracks, and dries as its moisture is drained. The pastures turn ashen, trees burn with all their leaves, and the dry corn feeds the fire that destroys it.

These are small griefs: great cities perish with their walls, and the fires reduce whole nations, people and all, to ashes. Forests burn with the mountains; Athos burns, and Cilician Taurus, Tmolus, Oeta, and Ida, dry now, once rich in springs; Helicon, haunt of the maidens, and Haemus, not yet Oeagrius’ mountain. Aetna burns fiercely, its fires doubled, and twin-peaked Parnassus, Eryx, Cynthus, Othrys, and Rhodope, destined at last to lose its snow; Mimas, Dindyma, Mycale, and Cithaeron, born for sacred rites.

Scythia gains no help from its cold: Caucasus burns, Ossa with Pindus, and Olympus, greater than either, the lofty Alps and cloud-bearing Apennines. Then indeed Phaethon sees the world ablaze on every side, and cannot bear the mighty heat. He draws into his mouth air boiling as though from a deep furnace, and feels his chariot glowing white-hot. He can no longer endure the ashes and flying sparks; hot smoke wraps him round on every side.

Shrouded in pitch-black darkness, he knows neither where he is nor where he goes, swept along at the horses’ will. It was then, they believe, that the peoples of Ethiopia turned black, their blood drawn to the surface of their bodies. Then Libya became a desert, its moisture stolen by the heat; then the nymphs, with streaming hair, wept for their springs and lakes. Boeotia searches for Dirce, Argos for Amymone, Ephyre for Pirene’s waters.

Nor do rivers whose lot has given them widely separated banks remain safe: Tanais smoked in the middle of its stream, and old Peneus, and Teuthranian Caicus, swift Ismenos and Erymanthus of Phegia, Xanthus, destined to burn again, and golden Lycormas, and Maeander, playing in its winding waters; Mygdonian Melas and Eurotas of Taenarus. Babylonian Euphrates burned, and Orontes burned, swift Thermodon, Ganges, Phasis, and Hister.

Alpheus boils, the banks of Spercheus burn, and the gold Tagus carries in its stream melts in the flames. The river birds whose songs delighted the Maeonian banks grew hot in the very midst of Cayster. The Nile fled in terror to the ends of the earth and hid its head, which is still hidden: its seven mouths lie empty and dusty, seven valleys without a river. The same fate dries Ismarian Hebrus and Strymon, and the western rivers, Rhine, Rhone, and Po, and Tiber, to whom dominion over the world was promised.

Everywhere the ground bursts apart, and light pierces through the cracks into Tartarus, terrifying its king and his consort. The sea shrinks, and where there was ocean a moment before lies a plain of dry sand. Mountains once covered by the deep emerge, adding to the scattered Cyclades. The fish seek the depths, and the arching dolphins no longer dare their customary leaps above the waves into the air.

The lifeless bodies of seals float belly-up on the sea’s surface. Even Nereus himself, they say, with Doris and their daughters, hid in their warmed caves. Three times Neptune ventured to thrust his arms and grim face above the waters; three times he could not bear the blazing air. Yet nurturing Earth, surrounded as she was by ocean, amid the sea’s waters and the springs that everywhere had shrunk and hidden themselves in their dark mother’s womb, parched, lifted her oppressed face as high as her neck, set her hand against her brow, and, shaking all things with a mighty tremor, sank a little, lower than her accustomed place, and spoke in a dry voice:

“If this is your will, and I have deserved it, why do your thunderbolts linger, greatest of gods? If I must perish by fire, let it be yours, and lighten my ruin by being its author. I can scarcely open my throat to speak these very words”— the heat had choked her voice—“Look at my scorched hair, the ashes heaped upon my eyes, upon my face! Is this the return you make me, this the reward for my fruitfulness and service, that I endure the wounds of the hooked plough and harrows, and am worked throughout the year; that I supply leaves for cattle, wholesome food—the crops— for humankind, and incense even for you?

But grant that I deserve destruction: what have the waters done, what has your brother done? Why do the seas allotted him shrink away, withdrawing farther from the sky? If neither your brother’s claims nor mine can move you, at least have pity on your own heaven. Look around: both poles are smoking. If the fire destroys them, your palaces will fall. Look, Atlas himself is struggling, scarcely sustaining the white-hot heavens on his shoulders.

If the seas, the earth, and heaven’s royal dwelling perish, we shall dissolve into ancient chaos. Rescue from the flames whatever still remains, and take thought for the universe.” So Earth spoke: she could no longer endure the heat or say anything more. She drew her face back into herself, into caverns nearer the shades below. Then the almighty father, calling the gods to witness, and the very god who had lent the chariot, that unless he helped all things would meet a dreadful end, climbed to the highest citadel, from which he would spread clouds over the wide earth, and roll the thunder and hurl his flashing bolts.

But now he had no clouds to spread over the earth, no rain to send down from heaven. He thundered, and, balancing a bolt beside his ear, hurled it from his right hand at the charioteer, casting him out of life and chariot alike, quenching fire with savage fire. The horses panic, leap in opposite directions, tear their necks from the yoke, and leave the broken reins behind.

Here lie the reins, there the axle wrenched from the pole; elsewhere the spokes of shattered wheels, and far and wide the wreckage of the mangled chariot. But Phaethon, flames ravaging his ruddy hair, tumbles headlong, trailing a long streak through the air, as sometimes a star in a clear sky, though it has not fallen, may seem to fall. Far from his homeland, in another quarter of the world, mighty Eridanus receives him and bathes his smoking face.

The western Naiads bury his body, still smoking from the three-forked flame, and mark the stone with these verses: HERE LIES PHAETHON, DRIVER OF HIS FATHER’S CHARIOT: THOUGH HE COULD NOT MASTER IT, HE FELL IN A GREAT ATTEMPT. For his father, pitiful in anguished grief, had veiled and hidden his face; and, if we may believe it, they say one day passed without the sun. The fires supplied the light: even that disaster had some use.

But Clymene, after saying all that could be said in such great sorrow, grieving, distraught, her bosom torn, searched the whole world. Seeking first his lifeless limbs, then his bones, she found them—yet buried on a foreign shore!— and threw herself upon the grave. Reading his name on the marble, she drenched it with tears and warmed it against her bare breast. No less do the Heliades mourn, offering tears, useless gifts to the dead, and beating their breasts with their hands.

Night and day they call Phaethon, who cannot hear their sorrowful laments, and lie prostrate on his tomb. Four times the Moon had joined her horns to fill her circle, and still they mourned as usual, for repetition had made it their custom. Phaethusa, the eldest of the sisters, wishing to sink to the ground, complained that her feet had stiffened. Fair Lampetie, trying to reach her, was held fast by a sudden root.

A third, preparing to tear her hair with her hands, plucked leaves instead. One grieves that her legs are enclosed in a trunk, another that her arms are turning into long branches. While they marvel, bark embraces their loins and gradually encircles belly, breast, shoulders, and hands, until only their mouths remain, calling to their mother. What can their mother do but run here and there, wherever anguish drives her, and kiss them while she can?

That is not enough: she tries to tear their bodies from the trunks and breaks the tender branches with her hands; but from them drops of blood flow as though from a wound. “Spare me, Mother, I beg you!” cries whichever one is hurt. “Spare me, I beg you! It is our flesh you tear within the tree. And now farewell”—the bark closed over her final words. From there their tears flow, and, dripping from the new branches, harden in the sun as amber, which the shining river receives and sends for Latin brides to wear.

Cycnus, son of Sthenelus, witnessed this marvel. Though joined to you, Phaethon, by your mother’s blood, he was closer still in spirit. He had left his kingdom— for he had ruled the Ligurian peoples and their great cities— and filled the green banks and the river Eridanus with lamentation, and the forest enlarged by your sisters, when his voice grew thin, white feathers hid his hair, and his neck stretched far from his breast. A web bound his reddening toes, wings clothed his sides, and a blunt beak took over his mouth.

Cycnus became a bird unknown before, trusting neither the sky nor Jupiter, mindful of the fire unjustly hurled by him. He seeks pools and open lakes, and, hating fire, chooses rivers for his home, the opposite of flame. Meanwhile Phaethon’s father, unkempt and stripped of his own radiance, as he is when eclipsed, hates the light, himself, and the day. He gives his heart to mourning, adds anger to his grief, and refuses the world his service. “Enough,” he says, “since time began, my lot has been unceasing toil. I am weary of the labours I have performed without end, without honour.

Let someone else drive the chariot that carries the light! If no one will, and all the gods admit they cannot, let Jupiter himself drive it, so that, while he tries our reins, he may at least lay aside the bolts that rob fathers of their sons. Then, having tested the strength of the fire-footed horses, he will know that one who failed to guide them did not deserve death.”

As the Sun speaks, all the gods gather round him and beg with pleading voices that he not plunge the world into darkness. Jupiter, too, excuses the bolt he hurled, and, like a king, adds threats to his entreaties. Phoebus gathers his maddened horses, still trembling with terror, and in his grief rages at them with goad and whip: in his rage he reproaches them with his son’s death and lays the blame on them.