The Imagines of the third-century AD Greek sophist Philostratus the Elder and his grandson Philostratus the Younger purport to be a series of descriptions of paintings hanging in an art gallery in Naples. The pictures, whether real or imaginary, are windows onto stories drawn from myth. The subject of this painting-story is Phaëthon, who drove the chariot of his father, the Sun god Helios, to his own destruction. The story had been told by Ovid a few centuries earlier and was picked up in the sixteenth century by the artist Michelangelo, who drew Phaëthon’s fall and the metamorphoses of his mourning sisters for a young nobleman named Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.

Golden are the tears of the Heliades, daughters of the Sun god Helios. The story goes that they flow for Phaëthon. For in his eagerness to drive, this son of Helios decided to entrust his life to his father’s chariot, but failed to keep hold of the reins and stumbled and fell into the River Eridanus. Wise men take this story as a sign that there is too much fire in the atmosphere. Poets and painters, for their part, visualise the horses and chariot – and the skies confounded.

For look! Night is driving Day from the meridian, and the round sun drags along the stars as it dips towards the earth. The Horae leave the gates behind as they flee towards the darkness approaching them, and the horses throw off their yokes and tear along, all wild. But the Earth sinks away and raises her hands as the furious flames draw near her. And the young chap falls and is borne down, down, for his hair is ablaze and his chest burning – he will fall into the River Eridanus and lend his legend to the water.

For indeed swans will exhale, now here, now there, sweet songs about the young man, and a wedge of swans will soar to sing this tale to the Cayster River and the Danube. No place will fail to hear this wondrous tale. The swans will be accompanied in their song by Zephyrus, the light-footed wayside wind god. For he is said to have come to an agreement with the swans to join with them in singing funeral songs. Such is Zephyrus’ harmony with the birds that you can see him playing them now as he would a musical instrument.

And they say that the women on the banks of the Eridanus, the daughters of Helios, not yet metamorphosed into trees, did, on account of their brother, change into trees, and wept.