“One might have expected Merops to be angry about Clymene bearing a child that was not his, but, knowing Phaethon to be the child of a god, Merops took the unusually wise course of raising Phaethon as if he were his own son.
“Being the son of a king was no small thing, and Phaethon should have been happy to be a prince, but unfortunately Clymene told him who his true father was, and Phaethon, hubris growing inside him, bragged incessantly about being the son of a god. Inevitably the other young boys were annoyed by his constant boasting, and eventually one of them announced loudly that the story was a lie.
“Phaethon went crying to his mother, who affirmed the truth of the story and sent him on a journey to meet his true father. How he got there no one knows. The Aethiopia of myth is not
