Bellerophon was the Corinthian hero of the Iliad who rode the winged horse Pegasus and killed the fire-breathing Chimera, and who later tried to fly to Olympus and was brought low. His story is told in one of the great set-pieces of the Iliad (Book VI, lines 144–211), in the speech of Glaucus to Diomedes on the plain of Troy, and it is the clearest case in Greek myth of a hero who almost became a god, and was thrown down precisely because he tried. The Bellerophon story is the mythic cousin of the Icarus story (the human desire to fly, brought low by the gods), and the two are often paired in modern readings. But the Bellerophon story is also a story of divine favour turned to divine punishment, and the pattern — “great hero, divine helper, great deeds, the attempt to be more than human, the fall” — is one of the central tragic structures of Greek myth.
The Hero of Corinth
Bellerophon, whose given name was Hipponous (the “horse-knower”), was the son of Glaucus, king of Corinth, and grandson of Sisyphus, the craftiest of the Greeks. The story of how he came to be called Bellerophon (“the slayer of Belleros”) is told by Plutarch and others: he killed a Corinthian nobleman named Belleros, fled to the court of King Proetus of Tiryns, and was there purified. The name was given in honour of the slaying, and the slight overstatement of the renaming was already a moral warning, since Bellerophon’s later fall would be a kind of moral echo of the first killing that named him.
The hero’s name is, in the standard scholarly reading, a reflex of his association with horses. He is the “horse-knower” before he is the “Belleros-slayer,” and his whole story is one of the equestrian: he tames Pegasus, he kills the Chimera from horseback, he is brought down from the air, and he ends his life as a wandering cripple. The Greek hero of the horse is older than the Greek hero of the chariot, and Bellerophon is one of the late examples of the older type.
The False Accusation
The story of his fall is told in the Iliad. Bellerophon had been received at the court of Proetus as a guest, and Proetus’s wife Anteia (called Stheneboea in later sources) fell in love with him. Bellerophon refused her advances, and Anteia, in anger, told her husband that Bellerophon had tried to rape her. Proetus, bound by the rules of guest-friendship, could not kill a guest himself. He therefore sent Bellerophon to the court of his father-in-law, the king of Lycia, with a sealed tablet in which was written a request that the king should kill the bearer.
The Lycian king, Iobates, did not want to kill a guest either. He therefore sent Bellerophon on a series of impossible tasks, of which the first was the killing of the Chimera. The standard pattern, of the host who would rather lose his kingdom than break a guest-obligation, is older than the Bellerophon story and is one of the central moral patterns of Greek myth. The Bellerophon version of it is unusual only in that the moral test is performed by both kings: Proetus is tested by his obligation not to kill a guest, Iobates by his obligation not to kill a guest. Both fail in the manner of the test (they try to get someone else to do the killing) but pass in the substance of it (the guest is not killed). This is the Greek ethical sense at work: the test of a difficult obligation is the test of finding a clever way out, not the test of submitting to the obligation straight on.
The Tasks of Bellerophon
The standard list of tasks, in the Iliad and in Apollodorus, runs to four or five. The first is the killing of the Chimera. The second is the defeat of the Solymi, a wild tribe in Lycia. The third is a campaign against the Amazons, the warrior-women of the Black Sea coast. The fourth is the killing of a band of Lycian warriors sent against him by stealth, which Bellerophon accomplished by an ambush at a river. The fifth, in Apollodorus, is the recovery of the Corinthian hounds — but this is a small task, and may be a late addition.
The first task, the killing of the Chimera, is the one for which Bellerophon is remembered, and it is the one that requires Pegasus. In some late sources, Bellerophon used a lead-tipped spear, which the Chimera swallowed and which melted in the fire of her breath, killing her. In others, he shot her with arrows from the air. The Iliad version (which is the older) does not specify the method: Glaucus says only that Bellerophon “alone of men” killed the Chimera, with the help of the gods.
The Winged Horse
Pegasus, the winged horse, was — in the standard genealogy from Hesiod’s Theogony — born from the neck of Medusa when Perseus cut off her head. The horse flew to Mount Helicon, struck the ground with his hoof, and brought forth the spring Hippocrene, the source of poetic inspiration. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, tamed Pegasus with a golden bridle and gave him to Bellerophon for his fight with the Chimera. The bridle is the key to the taming: Pegasus is divine, and only the gods can fully control a divine horse, but the bridle given by Athena is a divine tool, and it works.
Bellerophon, with the help of Pegasus, accomplished all the tasks. He killed the Chimera. He defeated the Solymi and the Amazons. He survived the ambush of the Lycian warriors, killing them all. The king of Lycia, recognising that the hero was under divine protection, gave him his daughter and half his kingdom, and Bellerophon lived in Lycia in honour, with sons and grandsons who would survive him.
The Attempt to Reach Olympus
The Iliad is terse: “Bellerophon came to be hated by all the gods. He wandered alone on the Aleian plain, eating his heart out, shunning the path of men.” The later sources fill in the picture. He had tried to fly to Olympus, on Pegasus, to take his place among the gods. The audacity angered Zeus, who sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus. The horse reared, and Bellerophon was thrown from the saddle. He fell to earth, in some sources landing blind and lame in a thorn-bush on the plain, in others landing in the sea. He survived, but he never recovered, and he lived the rest of his life as a wanderer on the Aleian plain, “eating his heart out, shunning the path of men.” The fall of Bellerophon is the Greek original of the moral pattern that becomes the Christian fall of Lucifer, and the two have been paired in the Christian tradition since the late antique.
The story is, again, a hubris story: the hero who has been helped by the gods believes, on the strength of that help, that he can join the gods, and the gods strike him down. The Pegasus of the early story — the divine helper — becomes the Pegasus of the later story — the instrument of the fall. The bridle, the chariot of the air, the flight to Olympus: the whole structure of the hero’s success is reversed in a single moment. The Greek moral sense is rigorous about this: the gift of the gods is a loan, not a title, and the hero who treats it as a title loses it.
Bellerophon in the Visual Arts
Bellerophon is a common subject in Greek and especially Corinthian art. The earliest surviving depictions are on the famous Chigi Vase (c. 650–625 BCE, now in the Villa Giulia in Rome), a Proto-Corinthian aryballos that shows the hero on the back of Pegasus. The aryballos is small — it would have held perfumed oil — but the painting is one of the masterpieces of early Greek art: the profile of Bellerophon, the wings of Pegasus, the dog, the trees, the viewer, the painter’s signature, all set in a continuous frieze. The scene is the killing of the Chimera. The Corinthian choice of Pegasus as the city’s emblem is one of the most-copied motifs of Greek and Roman coinage, and the obverse of the Corinthian stater shows Pegasus on one side and Athena on the other.
Bellerophon in Modern Literature
The Bellerophon story is the model for the heroic-fall narrative in the modern period. The clearest case is the Romantic poets: in Endymion (1818), Keats has his hero “feed on the damask cheek” of the moon, in an image that is a deliberate echo of the Bellerophon attempted flight; in Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley makes the same gesture, with a more explicit Greek reference. The 2010 film Clash of the Titans is not really a Bellerophon film, but the Sam Worthington hero, Perseus, takes on the role in modern retellings. Bellerophon appears in the Percy Jackson series, in the God of War franchise, and in many other modern retellings of the Greek myths.
A Note on Reading the Myth
Bellerophon is the test case for the limit of the Greek hero. Heracles, who had been helped by the gods and whose labours were also the preparation for apotheosis, is the case where the hero does make it to Olympus. Bellerophon is the case where the hero almost makes it, and is thrown down. The Greek moral sense is that the difference is not the hero’s merit, but the gods’ will: Heracles was a son of Zeus, and his apotheosis was the seal of his parentage. Bellerophon was a mortal, descended from Sisyphus, and his apotheosis was not in the cards. The moral, if there is one, is not that heroes should not try to fly, but that the gods decide who flies and who does not, and the decision is not always just by human standards.
For more, see the Pegasus profile, the Chimera page, and the discussion of hubris in Greek mythology.