Clymene

deity water Greek single tradition · 6

Clymene is an Oceanid and the mother of Phaethon by Helios. She hid the boy's true parentage and claimed he had been fathered by her nominal husband Merops, the king of Aethiopia. She reveals her son his true parentage, perhaps to help him overcome his reluctance to get married.

↻ synthesized from 6 sources

When

First attested
800 BCE
Attested period
-800 – 2020
Historical notes
Attested in Euripides' tragedy Phaethon.

Relationships

consort of
Zeus, Iapetus, Helios, Merops
child of
Oceanus

Expand to full subgraph →

Sources

Source passages

“Phaethon is the son of Helios by an Oceanid named Clymene, who nonetheless hid the boy's true parentage and claimed he had been fathered by her nominal husband Merops, the king of Aethiopia”

#17801 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

“According to Apollodorus, Asia was the wife of the Titan Iapetus, and mother of Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius although Hesiod gave the name of another Oceanid, Clymene, as their mother.”

#27744 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

“Lampetia has alternately been named as one of the Heliades, which would have made her the daughter of Helios and Clymene, an Oceanid.”

#28719 · extracted by anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5

“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”

#41443 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

“Clymene was the wife of the Titan Iapetus, and mother of Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus, and Epimetheus.”

#43462 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001