Bellerophon tamed Pegasus and killed the Chimera. Most versions of the Bellerophon myth stop there, treating it like a simple hero story — accurately capturing what happened but focusing entirely on the wrong part, the way describing the Titanic as a ship that hit ice captures the fact without the meaning. Bellerophon's victories were extraordinary: he tamed the winged horse Pegasus, killed the fire-breathing Chimera, defeated the Solymi and the Amazons, and survived an ambush by fifteen of Lycia's finest warriors. He was given a king's daughter in marriage and half a kingdom in recognition of his services. And then, after all of that, he attempted to ride Pegasus to the top of Mount Olympus. Zeus sent a gadfly to sting the horse. Bellerophon fell.
The fall is the myth. Everything else is the run-up.
Who Was Bellerophon in Greek Mythology?
Bellerophon was a prince of Corinth, which is worth dwelling on for a moment, because geography shapes mythology more reliably than any divine intervention. Corinth sat between two seas — the Saronic Gulf to the east, the Corinthian Gulf to the west — planted like a toll-keeper at the only gate between northern and southern Greece, which gave it wealth and gave its mythology a particular quality of restlessness, the stories of people who stood at crossroads and had to decide which direction to choose. Bellerophon was born into this, the son of the sea-god Poseidon (according to some sources) or of the mortal king Glaucus (according to others, including Homer, who was never enthusiastic about excessive divinity in his heroes), and his life in Corinth ended when he killed a man — the details vary, but the killing is consistent — and was sent into exile.
He fetched up at the court of King Proetus in Tiryns, who received him as a guest and extended hospitality, which in the Greek moral framework created obligations so serious they were practically contractual. Then Proetus's wife Anteia — called Stheneboea in some versions, which tells you something about how carefully the ancient world remembered the women in these stories, which is to say: not very — fell in love with Bellerophon, was refused, and told her husband that Bellerophon had attempted to seduce her. This is, in mythology, a story type so common it has a name: the Phaedra motif, the false accusation, the man undone by a woman's word. Proetus believed her and wanted Bellerophon dead, but was constrained by the hospitality laws that prevented him from doing the killing himself. He solved this problem with elegant indirection: he sent Bellerophon to King Iobates of Lycia, carrying a sealed letter that said, in effect, please kill the man who brought you this letter.
Iobates had the same problem with hospitality. He had already entertained Bellerophon for nine days before he opened the letter and read it. So instead of killing him outright, he sent him on a series of tasks that were designed to accomplish the same result more plausibly — starting with the Chimera.
How Did Bellerophon Die?
The myth does not give him a death. He falls from Pegasus, survives the fall, and then — in the way ancient sources handle endings they find uncomfortable — simply continues. He wanders. The gods do not finish him; they withdraw, which amounts to the same thing without the drama. What the version of him that walked onto the Aleian plain had lost was not his life but his narrative: the man who killed the Chimera was gone. What remained was what the gods left behind when they took back everything they had lent.
Why Did Bellerophon Fall From Pegasus?
The Chimera was a lion in the front, a goat in the middle, and a serpent at the rear, breathing fire from whatever part of the arrangement was responsible for fire on any given day, and it had been ravaging Lycia in the way that mythological monsters ravage regions: comprehensively and without apparent motive beyond the mythological requirement that heroes have something to fight. Bellerophon killed it from the air, riding Pegasus — the winged horse he had tamed at the Pirene spring in Corinth with the help of Athena, who gave him a golden bridle and the knowledge of how to use it. Then Iobates sent him against the Solymi, a fierce neighboring people, and Bellerophon defeated them. Then against the Amazons. Then into an ambush of fifteen Lycian warriors, which he survived, at which point Iobates, with the pragmatic flexibility of a man who recognizes when the universe is not cooperating with his plans, concluded that Bellerophon was clearly under divine protection, apologized, gave him his daughter in marriage, and made him heir to half the kingdom.
There is a philosophical point worth making here about the nature of divine favor, which is that the gods in Greek mythology are generous with assistance right up to the moment their assistance produces someone who no longer needs them, at which point the assistance stops and the trouble begins. Bellerophon had been given Pegasus, had been guided by Athena, had survived everything the mortal world threw at him, and his reward was a kingdom and a wife and a life that, by any reasonable measure, constituted success. The myth does not explain precisely what made him decide that was insufficient. It simply tells us that he tried to fly to Olympus.
The attempt is either the definition of ambition or the definition of ingratitude, depending on your perspective and how much sympathy you have for a man who has been treated extraordinarily well by the divine world and wants more of it. Zeus, whose perspective on these matters was both omniscient and not particularly forgiving, sent a gadfly. The gadfly stung Pegasus. Pegasus bucked. Bellerophon fell.
He did not die, which is its own cruelty. He wandered for the rest of his life on the Aleian plain — a name that means, approximately, the plain of wandering, which is the ancient world's way of saying that this was where people who had lost their narrative purpose ended up — lame, alone, hated by the gods, eating his heart out in the standard Greek formulation for inescapable grief. Pegasus, meanwhile, became a divine horse. The gods kept the horse and gave the man a limp.
The Fall from Heaven is, at its core, a story about the precise location of the line between worthy ambition and fatal presumption, and the tragic fact that you cannot see where that line is until after you have already crossed it. The gods in this myth are not wrong, exactly — Olympus is genuinely not available to mortals, and the rule is both real and consistently enforced — but there is something deeply uncomfortable about a world in which divine gifts lead inevitably to divine punishment, in which the capacity to dream upward is built into you at the same moment as the ceiling that will stop you. Bellerophon is not a fool. He is not even, in the strictest sense, wrong to try. He is simply human, which in the Greek scheme of things was always the proximate cause of tragedy.
The Fall from Heaven: The Myth of Bellerophon and Pegasus
Book One of the Myths of the Ancient World series. The retelling of Bellerophon's complete story — from Corinth to the Chimera to the attempt on Olympus — in a voice that has no particular interest in celebrating the legend at the expense of the person inside it.
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