Bellerophon

Bellerophon was born in the city of Corinth, which the Greeks called Ephyra, the most ancient name of the place. His father was Glaucus, the king of Corinth, and his grandfather was Sisyphus, the wiliest man in Greece, a king who had chained Thanatos, the personification of death, and had tricked Persephone, the queen of the Underworld, into letting him return to the living. Some said that Bellerophon's true father was Poseidon, the god of the sea and earthquakes, whose blood ran in the family through Sisyphus's cunning. He grew up in the most sophisticated court in the Peloponnese, the peninsula of southern Greece, trained in the arts of war and horsemanship, and he was as handsome as he was proud. But pride and beauty together would prove his ruin.

The trouble began when Bellerophon visited the court of Proetus, the king of Tiryns, a fortress city in the Argolid. Proetus was married to Stheneboea, a woman of royal blood, and when she saw the young Corinthian she desired him. She made her advances plain, and when Bellerophon refused her out of loyalty to his host, she turned her lust to vengeance. She accused him before her husband of attempting to assault her, a charge that demanded death. But Proetus was bound by the laws of guest-friendship, the sacred bond between host and guest, and he could not kill a man who had eaten at his table. Instead, he sent Bellerophon to Lycia, a kingdom on the coast of Asia Minor, with a sealed letter for Iobates, the king of Lycia and his father-in-law. The letter contained a single command: kill the bearer.

Iobates received Bellerophon with all the hospitality due to a guest, and for nine days he feasted him without opening the letter. On the tenth day he read it, and he too was bound by the same sacred law. He could not murder a man who had shared his bread. So he devised a series of tasks that no mortal could survive, hoping that the monsters and enemies he sent against Bellerophon would do the killing for him. The first task was the Chimaera, a creature born from Typhon, the monstrous storm giant with a hundred serpent heads, and Echidna, the half-woman half-serpent mother of monsters. The Chimaera had the body and head of a lion, a goat's head rising from its back, and a serpent for a tail, and it breathed fire that melted stone and bronze. It had been ravaging the countryside of Lycia, burning villages and fields, and no army could stand against it.

Bellerophon knew that he could not defeat such a beast on foot. He sought the winged horse Pegasus, a creature born from the blood of Medusa, the Gorgon whose face turned all who looked upon it to stone, when the hero Perseus severed her head. Pegasus was wild and untamable, drinking from a spring on the Acrocorinth, the citadel hill of Corinth. Bellerophon prayed to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, and she came to him in a dream and gave him a golden bridle. When he awoke, the bridle was in his hand. He went to the spring, found Pegasus drinking, and placed the bridle upon him. The horse submitted, and from that day Bellerophon rode the skies.

He flew to Lycia and found the Chimaera. From Pegasus's back, high above the monster's reach, he shot it with arrows tipped with lead. The lead melted in the creature's fiery breath and flowed down its throat, choking it from within. The Chimaera died, and Bellerophon returned to Iobates in triumph. The king then sent him against the Solymi, a fierce tribe of Lycia, and Bellerophon defeated them in battle. Then Iobates sent him against the Amazons, the tribe of warrior women who lived beyond the river Thermodon, and he drove them back. Then he was sent against the pirates of Caria, and he destroyed them. Each time he returned victorious, and Iobates realised that the young man was favoured by the gods. He gave Bellerophon his daughter in marriage and half his kingdom, and the hero lived in honour and wealth.

But success turned to arrogance. Bellerophon began to believe that his deeds had made him equal to the gods. He resolved to fly Pegasus to the summit of Olympus, the home of Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled with his thunderbolt, and to take his place among the immortals. Zeus saw the winged horse rising toward the divine threshold and was angered. He sent a gadfly, or in some accounts a thunderbolt, to sting Pegasus. The horse reared and threw Bellerophon from his back. The hero fell from the sky and crashed to the earth, shattering his body. He did not die, but he was blinded and crippled, and he wandered alone on the Aleian Plain, a desolate stretch of land in Lycia, shunned by gods and men alike. He lived out his days in misery, a warning that no mortal, however heroic, may approach the throne of heaven.