Bellerophon and Pegasus

The story has three movements: a hero sent away to die, a horse that makes him unbeatable, and a flight that ends him. Only the first is in the oldest source. In Homer's Iliad, Glaucus tells Diomedes how his grandfather Bellerophon came to Lycia. Anteia, the wife of King Proetus, lusted after Bellerophon and was refused. She then told Proetus a tale of lies.

Proetus feared to kill a guest himself. He sent Bellerophon to Lycia with a folded tablet of deadly signs, to be shown to his own wife's father. That father was the Lycian king, and the tablet asked for Bellerophon's death. The king feasted him for nine days, opened the token on the tenth, and gave him his first order: kill the raging Chimaera.

Homer's Bellerophon has no horse. Pegasus comes from other poets. Hesiod says he sprang from Medusa when Perseus cut off her head, and flew away to the house of Zeus (Theogony 278-286). Apollodorus calls him the offspring of Medusa and Poseidon, a tale told in full at Perseus and Medusa.

Pindar supplies the meeting. In Olympian 13, Bellerophon suffered greatly beside a spring when he wanted to harness Pegasus. He had slept on the altar of Athena at a seer's bidding. In the night the maiden Pallas brought him a bridle with golden cheek-pieces. The seer told him to obey the dream, sacrifice a strong-footed bull to the holder of the earth, and raise an altar to Athena, goddess of horses.

Once the bridle was on, nothing more was needed. Pindar says Bellerophon stretched the gentle charmed bridle around the jaws of the horse and caught the winged horse. Mounted on its back and armoured in bronze, he began at once to play with weapons. Poseidon is the god to whom the sacrifice is owed. Apollodorus makes him the horse's father, so the gift of the bridle and the duty to the sire come from two different gods.

The Chimera is where the horse pays off, and the sources disagree about how much. Homer says only that Bellerophon slew her, trusting in the signs of the gods. She was of divine stock, in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing blazing fire. Hesiod, listing the monsters of Typhon's line, says of the Chimera only: "Her did Pegasus and noble Bellerophon slay."

Apollodorus gives the method. Bellerophon mounted his winged steed, and soaring on high shot down the Chimera from the height. Pindar puts the whole Lycian campaign in the air. From the chilly bosom of the lonely air, he says, Bellerophon attacked the Amazons and killed the fire-breathing Chimaera and the Solymi. Here the horse turns a task built to kill him into the first of his victories.

The Chimera is only the first of the king's traps, and Homer and Apollodorus keep the same order. Next Bellerophon fought the Solymi, which Homer's Glaucus calls the mightiest battle of warriors that Bellerophon ever entered. Third he slew the Amazons. On his way back the king chose the bravest men of Lycia for an ambush, and Bellerophon killed them all.

Then the king knew him for the valiant offspring of a god. He kept Bellerophon in Lycia and gave him his daughter and half his royal honour. In Apollodorus he names the daughter Philonoe and leaves Bellerophon the kingdom at his death. In Homer the Lycians also mark out an estate of orchard and ploughland for him.

The ending is where the sources split, and the two oldest do not mention each other's version. Homer has no flight. When Bellerophon came to be hated by all the gods, he wandered alone over the Aleian plain, devouring his own soul and shunning the paths of men. Ares killed his son Isander, and Artemis killed his daughter in wrath. Homer gives no reason for the gods' hatred.

Pindar's Olympian 13 declines to say how he died. It says only that Pegasus has found shelter in the ancient stables of Zeus on Olympus. Isthmian 7 is blunter and gives the fall as a lesson: a man who looks to things far away is too short to reach the bronze-floored home of the gods.

Pindar adds a maxim: a thing that is sweet beyond measure is awaited by a most bitter end. The horse that made Bellerophon's victories possible is the same horse that ends them, and the sin is hubris in the plainest sense, a mortal reaching for a place among the gods. Hesiod's Pegasus never needed a rider to get there. He flew to Zeus alone and carries his thunder and lightning.