Killed when trying to drive his father's chariot and came too close to earth

Usage examples of phaethon.

In a reverse of the usual yogic progress over beds of hot charcoal, Phaethon left charred footsteps where he trod.

There her tribe awaited her: butterfly-winged Icara, flaring Phaethon, the truly reborn Harry Fullerton, Hacker the garage owner and thirty-odd more, all waiting to be pitted against the first tribe.

Up at those topmost windows, Phaethon would then transform the column into a genuine Pharos — one designed to lure lost navigators with its beacon and its bait, wrecking them below.

Thelma gazed up at Phaethon behind glass high at the top of the column.

Half of Phaethon got blasted into asteroids, Major … uh, General, and the rest raced off towards Saturn.

She thought of Dr Herschbinder’s planet Phaethon, wrecked by smelly bombs.

He was forty-three years old and it was the opening night of Phaethon, an opera he had written at the age of twenty-four.

He had changed the ancient Greek myth to his own purpose and meaning: Phaethon, the young son of Helios, who stole his father's chariot and, in ambitious audacity, attempted to drive the sun across the sky, did not perish, as he perished in the myth.

All were caught and held, like Phaethon, by some powerful magic that imposed a quiet if not always a peaceful slumber.

The cab-driver, who at once saluted him with the hiss of a serpent, might be that very Phaethon who had set this happiness in motion twelve months ago.