Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In Homer Anteia’s false accusation launches Bellerophon to Lycia; her later fate is untold. Euripides’ lost *Stheneboea* filled that silence. After Bellerophon had survived Iobates’ trials and returned (or after the truth of her lie was known), Stheneboea’s desire and shame did not end. Fragments and ancient summaries indicate that Bellerophon came back to Proetus’s house; Stheneboea again approached him; he rejected her. In one reconstructed plot he took her up on Pegasus as if to carry her away, then threw her into the sea—so that her death is punishment matching her crime. In another strand she kills herself when her love and her falsehood alike are exposed. Hyginus and later mythographers preserve the suicide (or the sea-fall) as the moral close of the Potiphar’s-wife pattern: the accuser does not prosper when the hero returns in glory. Catalogue this as the Euripidean tragic appendix to 03/082—not a second Chimera story, but the woman’s end. The play’s exact staging is fragmentary; the classical reception agrees that Stheneboea dies in consequence of the rejected passion and the failed denunciation.