Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Pegasus, the winged horse born from Medusa’s blood when Perseus beheaded her, was tamed by Bellerophon with Athena’s help. Pindar tells that the hero slept in Athena’s temple; she brought a golden bridle; he caught Pegasus at the spring Peirene in Corinth. Mounted on the immortal horse he accomplished Iobates’s tasks—above all shooting the Chimera from the air, sometimes with lead that melted in the beast’s fiery breath and choked it (a scholiastic/Apollodorean combat detail). Success bred hubris. Bellerophon attempted to ride Pegasus up to the halls of Zeus and join the gods. Zeus sent a gadfly (or otherwise startled the horse); Bellerophon fell to earth. Homer’s brief end says the gods came to hate him and he wandered alone over the Aleian plain, “devouring his own heart,” shunning the paths of men—a mutilated, outcast coda without explicit fall narrative. Pindar and tragedy supply the heavenward flight and the crash; Apollodorus notes that he fell and was lamed when he tried to ascend to heaven. Pegasus continued to Zeus’s stable and carried the thunderbolt. Bellerophon’s arc thus runs from guest-victim and monster-slayer to the cautionary type of the mortal who reaches too high: Homeric melancholy wandering versus the later, sharper image of a fall from the sky.