Bellerophon

• 1. Introduction

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  Bellerophon was ranked among the greatest heroes of ancient Greek mythology, placed alongside Cadmus and Perseus as one of "the greatest hero and slayer of monsters" before the days of Heracles. He rode a winged horse, killed a fire-breathing creature that could melt lead with a single breath, and then made the one mistake that gods will not forgive: he tried to join them.

  His story begins not with glory but with exile and shame. A name scratched into a sealed tablet carries a death sentence across continents. A king feasts his would-be assassin for nine days before reading the order to kill him. And a hero who survived the impossible eventually fell to a single insect.

  Who was Bellerophon before the myths shaped him into a monster-slayer? What does his name actually mean? And what did the playwright Euripides make of a man who doubted the gods themselves? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A Name Soaked in Blood

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  Scholars have never settled on a single meaning for the name Bellerophon. One interpretation traces it to the ancient Greek words for "projectile" or "dart" combined with the word for "slayer," making him something like "the dart-thrower who kills." Robert Graves proposed a different route, reading the name as beleēphoron, meaning "bearing darts." Joseph T. Shipley went further still, interpreting it simply as "slayer of monsters."

  Geoffrey Kirk favored the most specific explanation: the name means "slayer of Belleros." According to the Scholia of Homer, Bellerophon was born with a different name entirely: Hipponous. He gained the name Bellerophon only after killing a Corinthian man named Belleros by accident while practicing knife-throwing with his friends. That act of accidental killing forced him out of Corinth and set the entire myth in motion.

  Two Byzantine scholars, John Tzetzes and Eustathius of Thessalonica, both mention this Belleros who was accidentally killed, though scholars believe they were simply following Bellerophon's own name-etymology rather than drawing on independent sources. Some scholars raise a further possibility: that Belleros may have been a local Lycian daimon rather than a historical figure, because Bellerophon's name, as one source notes, "invited all sorts of speculation."

• 3. The Sealed Letter

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  After killing Belleros, the newly named Bellerophon had to seek ritual cleansing from a king. He went to Proetus, who ruled Tiryns, one of the Achaean strongholds of the Argolid. Proetus performed the cleansing, fulfilling his obligation as host under the laws of xenia, the Greek code of hospitality that made a guest sacred.

  That protection worked against Proetus in the end. His wife, named in various sources as Anteia or Stheneboea, made advances on Bellerophon. He refused her. She then accused him of trying to violate her, reversing the story entirely. Proetus was furious, but he could not kill a guest without breaking divine law and incurring the wrath of the Erinyes, the spirits of vengeance.

  His solution was elegant and cold. He sent Bellerophon to Lycia, to the court of King Iobates, who happened to be Proetus's own father-in-law. Bellerophon carried a sealed letter in a folded tablet, unaware of its contents. The message read: "Please remove this bearer from the world: he attempted to violate my wife, your daughter."

  Iobates received the young hero, feasted him for nine days before opening the tablets, then faced the same dilemma as Proetus. A king could not murder a guest. So Iobates chose a different approach: he would send Bellerophon to fight something that would do the killing for him.

• 4. The Chimera's Breath

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  The fortune teller Polyeidos was the one who told Bellerophon what he was about to face. Polyeidos was a famous Corinthian seer, and it was he who advised Bellerophon that he would need the winged horse Pegasus to have any hope of defeating the Chimera.

  The Chimera was not simply large or fierce. Homer described it with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. Its breath came out, in Homer's own words, "in terrible blasts of burning flame." It had been terrorizing the countryside of neighboring Caria, and Iobates sent Bellerophon directly to it.

  Polyeidos told Bellerophon to sleep in the temple of Athena. In the dream that followed, the goddess placed a golden bridle beside him and spoke: "Sleepest thou, prince of the house of Aiolos? Come, take this charm for the steed and show it to the Tamer thy father as thou makest sacrifice to him of a white bull." When Bellerophon woke, the bridle was there. The seer told him which well to find Pegasus drinking at: the spring called Pirene, never-failing, on the citadel of Corinth itself, the city where Bellerophon was born.

  Armed with the golden bridle, Bellerophon captured Pegasus and flew back to Lycia. When he arrived, he discovered quickly that riding a winged horse was not enough. He could not harm the Chimera even from the air. Then the Chimera's breath reached him. Feeling that terrible heat, he had an idea. He mounted a large block of lead onto his spear, flew directly at the creature, and drove the lead deep into its throat. The Chimera's own fire-breath melted the lead, which blocked its airway and suffocated it. Some painters on red-figure pottery remembered the scene differently, showing Bellerophon with Poseidon's trident rather than a lead-tipped spear.

• 5. A Kingdom Earned in Blood

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  King Iobates did not believe the news when Bellerophon returned alive. He sent him out again, this time against the Amazons, warriors who, as the source puts it, "fight like men." Bellerophon killed them from above, dropping boulders from Pegasus. In some versions of the myth, the Solymi faced him before the Amazons.

  Iobates then sent him against a Carian pirate named Cheirmarrhus. When Bellerophon survived that too, Iobates dispatched his own men to ambush the hero. Bellerophon killed every one of them. Then Iobates sent the palace guards. At that point, Bellerophon called on Poseidon, who was his true father, and Poseidon flooded the plain of Xanthus, driving water behind Bellerophon as he approached the palace.

  The women of the palace rushed out with their robes lifted to expose themselves, hoping to stop Bellerophon's advance. Unwilling to confront them while they were undressed, he withdrew. Iobates, witnessing all of this, finally relented. He produced the letter from Proetus and admitted the truth. He gave Bellerophon his daughter Philonoe in marriage and granted him half the kingdom, including its fine vineyards and grain fields.

  Bellerophon's revenge on Stheneboea came later. He returned to Proetus's court and pretended to love her, promising to carry her away to Caria. She followed him eagerly onto Pegasus. While they flew over Milos, Bellerophon threw her from the horse. She drowned. Fishermen found her body and returned it. Bellerophon told Proetus exactly what he had done, presenting her death as justice for her false accusation.

• 6. The Fall from Heaven

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  Bellerophon's fame grew until his sense of his own greatness grew with it. He decided that his victory over the Chimera entitled him to ride Pegasus all the way to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods. Zeus responded by sending a gadfly to sting the horse. Pegasus bucked, Bellerophon fell back to earth, and died.

  A second tradition offers a different account of his end. In the Plain of Aleion, meaning "Wandering," in Cilicia, Bellerophon survived the fall but was blinded after landing in a thorn bush. He spent the rest of his life wandering, "devouring his own soul," in the phrase that survived, until he died. Pegasus, for his part, completed the flight to Olympus alone, where Zeus put him to work as a pack horse for his thunderbolts.

  The playwright Euripides wrote a tragedy called Bellerophon, now lost, though around thirty quotations from it survived in other texts. Those fragments are enough for scholars to understand its central theme: the tragic consequences of Bellerophon's attempt on Olympus. One surviving passage shows Bellerophon apparently doubting the existence of the gods. He seems to argue that the wicked live in comfort while the virtuous suffer, a contradiction that makes the gods' existence hard to defend. This passage was striking enough that Aristophanes used it as evidence of what he called the "atheism" of Euripides, the poet himself rather than his character.

• 7. A Hero Replaced

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  Bellerophon had a complicated relationship with the horse Pegasus even before his capture of the animal. In Stephanus of Byzantium's Ethnica, there is a genealogy for a figure called Chrysaor, meaning "of the golden sword." Chrysaor and Pegasus were both born from the severed neck of Medusa, who had been carrying the child of Poseidon. Chrysaor, the source notes, has no myth beyond his birth, while the entire story belongs to the horse: "From this moment we hear no more of Chrysaor, the rest of the tale concerning the stallion only... the immortal horse by his mortal brother."

  This makes Pegasus, in a sense, Bellerophon's half-brother through Poseidon, a detail that deepens the relationship between hero and winged horse into something closer to kinship.

  Bellerophon's legacy also suffered a specific, traceable displacement. During the Classical period, the more familiar hero Perseus began to absorb the association with Pegasus that had always belonged to Bellerophon. This substitution was standardized during the Middle Ages and carried forward into the work of European poets of the Renaissance and beyond. The Iliad preserves the original account in Bellerophon's grandson Glaucus, who tells his grandfather's story during the Trojan War, but later storytellers found Perseus a more comfortable vessel. Bellerophon, the monster-slayer who doubted the gods and fell to earth for the presumption, was gradually replaced by a safer figure.