Bellerophon and Pegasus: The Rider of the Winged Horse

Bellerophon's story begins with blood spilled in exile-worthy violence, though the tellings disagree on its shape. In one narrative he killed his own brother, named variously as Deliades, Peiren, or Alcimenes. In a separate, more precise account, he accidentally killed a Corinthian citizen named Belleros while practicing knife-throwing with friends — and it was this second version that supposedly explains the change of his name from Hipponous, 'horse-knower,' to Bellerophon, 'slayer of Belleros.' Whichever the cause, the killing forced him into exile, a familiar opening for a Greek hero: banishment as the doorway to legend.

Bellerophon was said to be the son of Poseidon and the mortal woman Eurynome, raised as a foster son by Glaucus, king of Corinth and grandson of Sisyphus. He fled to Tiryns, in the Argolid, where King Proetus cleansed him of his crime according to the customs of hospitality. But Proetus's wife — called Anteia or Stheneboea in different sources — tried to seduce the young exile. When Bellerophon refused her, she accused him instead, claiming he had tried to force himself on her. Proetus, unwilling to kill a guest under his own roof for fear of divine punishment, chose a subtler cruelty: he sent Bellerophon to Lycia, to King Iobates — who was Proetus's own father-in-law — carrying a sealed tablet that asked Iobates to destroy the bearer.

Iobates feasted with his guest for nine days before reading the message. Once he did, he too balked at murdering a man under his protection. Instead, he devised a task he assumed would kill Bellerophon just as surely: slay the Chimera, a monster terrorizing nearby Caria, with the body of a goat, the head of a lion, and the tail of a serpent, breathing blasts of fire.

On the road to this seemingly impossible fight, Bellerophon met the Corinthian seer Polyeidos, who told him that to defeat the Chimera he would need the help of Pegasus, the untamed winged horse. Polyeidos instructed him to sleep in the temple of Athena. There, in a dream, the goddess left him a golden bridle, telling him to take the charm and show it to his father — Poseidon, the Tamer — while sacrificing a white bull. Waking with the bridle in hand, Bellerophon understood: he must approach Pegasus at the well where the horse came to drink.

With Athena's charmed bridle, he tamed the horse that had sprung, along with his brother Chrysaor, from the neck of Medusa at the moment of her death by Poseidon's seed. Mounted on Pegasus, Bellerophon flew above the Chimera and killed it — one of the great monster-slayings of Greek myth, ranking him, ancient sources say, alongside Cadmus and Perseus as heroes who came before Heracles.