Bellerophon (βελλεροφῶν) or Bellerophontes (βελλεροφόντης) was a hero of
Greek mythology, "the greatest hero and slayer of monsters, alongside of
Kadmos and Perseus, before the days of Heracles",[1] whose greatest feat was to
have killed the Chimera, a monster that Homer
depicted with a lion's head, a goats body, and a serpent's tail: "her breath came out in terrible blasts of burning
flame".[2]
Bellerophon's myth
Iliad vi.155–203 contains an embedded narrative told by Bellerophon's grandson Glaucus, named for his
great-grandfather, which recounts Bellerophon's myth. Bellerophon was son of the king
Glaucus ("sea-green"[3])
of Corinth and the grandson of death-cheating Sisyphus, who had been sent to Tartarus for his many impieties in life,
though he had founded Corinth. Bellerophon's grandsons Sarpedon and the younger Glaucus fought
in the Trojan War. In the Epitome of
pseudo-Apollodorus, a genealogy is given for Chrysaor ("of
the golden sword") that would make him a double of Bellerophon; he too is called the son of Glaucus the son of Sisyphus. Chrysaor
has no myth save that of his birth: from the severed neck of Medusa, who was with child by
Poseidon, he and Pegasus both sprang at the moment of her death. "From this moment we hear no
more of Chrysaor, the rest of the tale concerning the stallion only...[who visits the spring of Pirene] perhaps also for his
brother's sake, by whom in the end he let himself be caught, the immortal horse by his mortal brother."[4]
Bellerophon's heroic journey began in the familiar way,[5] with an exile: he had murdered either his brother, whose name is usually given as Deliades, or of a
shadowy "enemy" other, a "Belleros",[6])</ref> though
the details are never directly told, and in expiation of his crime arrived as a suppliant to Proetus, king in Tiryns, one of the Mycenaean strongholds of the
Argolid. Proetus, by virtue of his kingship, cleansed Bellerophon of his crime. The wife of the
king, whether named Anteia[7] or Stheneboea,[8] took a fancy to him, but when she was repulsed accused him of having attempted to ravish her.[9] Proetus dared not satisfy his anger by killing a guest, so he
sent Bellerophon to king Iobates his father-in-law, in the plain of the River Xanthus in Lycia, bearing a sealed message in a folded tablet: "Pray remove
the bearer from this world: he attempted to violate my wife, your daughter."[10] Before opening the tablets, Iobates feasted with Bellerophon for nine days. On reading the tablet's
message Iobates too feared the wrath of the Erinyes if he murdered a guest; so he sent
Bellerophon on a mission that he deemed impossible: to kill the fire-breathing monster the Chimera, living in neighboring
Caria.
Bellerophon riding Pegasus (1914)
The Lycian seer Polyeidos told Bellerophon that he would have need of Pegasus. To obtain the services of the untamed winged horse, Polyeidos told Bellerophon to sleep in the temple
of Athena. While Bellerophon slept, he dreamed that Athena set a golden bridle beside him, saying
"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."[11] It was there when he awoke. Bellerophon had to approach Pegasus while it drank
from a well; Polyeidos told him which well — the never-failing Pirene on the citadel of Corinth,
the city of Bellerophon's birth. Other accounts say that Athena brought Pegasus already tamed and bridled, or that
Poseidon the horse-tamer, secretly the father of Bellerophon, brought Pegasus, as
Pausanias understood.[12] Bellerophon mounted his steed and flew off to where the Chimera was said to dwell.
The slaying of the Chimera
When he arrived in Lycia, the Chimera was truly ferocious, and he could not harm the monster even while riding on Pegasus. He
felt the heat of the breath the Chimera expelled, the Gods helped him once again. They told him to get a large block of lead and
mount it on his spear. He did so, and then flew head-on towards the Chimera, holding out the spear as far as he could
(illustration, right). Before he broke off his attack, he managed to lodge the block of lead inside the Chimera's throat.
The beast's fire-breath melted the lead, and blocked its air passage.[13] The Chimera suffocated, and Bellerophon returned victorious to King Iobates.[14] Iobates, on Bellerophon's return, was unwilling to credit his story. A
series of daunting further quests ensues: he is sent against the warlike Solymi and then against the Amazons who fight like men, whom Bellerophon
vanquishes by dropping boulders from his winged horse; he is sent against a Carian pirate, Cheirmarrhus; an ambush fails, when
Bellerophon kills all sent to assassinate him; the palace guards are sent against him, but Bellerophon calls upon Poseidon, who
floods the plain of Xanthus behind Bellerophon as he approached, but the palace women sent him
and the flood in retreat by rushing from the gates with their robes lifted high, offering themselves, to which the modest hero
replied by withdrawing[15] Iobates relented, produced the
letter, and allowed Bellerophon to marry his daughter Philonoe, the younger sister of Anteia,
and shared with him half his kingdom,[16] with fine
vineyards and grain fields. The lady Philonoe bore him Isander,[17] Hippolochus and Laodamia, who lay with Zeus the Counselor and
bore Sarpedon but was slain by Artemis[18] However, as Bellerophon's fame grew, so did his hubris. Bellerophon felt that because of his victory over the Chimera he deserved to fly to Mount Olympus, the realm of the gods. However, this presumption angered Zeus
and he sent a fly to sting the horse causing Bellerophon to fall all the way back to Earth[19] on the Plain of Aleion ("Wandering"), where he lived out his life in misery as
a blinded cripple, grieving and shunning the haunts of men.[20]
Euripides' Bellerophontes
Enough fragments of Euripides' lost tragedy Bellerophontes remain embedded as some
thirty quotations in surviving texts to give scholars a basis for assessing its theme: the tragic outcome of his attempt to storm
Olympus on Pegasus. An outspoken passage— in which Bellerophon seems to doubts the gods' existence from the contrast between the
wicked and impious, who live lives of ease with the privations suffered by the good— is apparently the basis for Aristophanes' imputation of "atheism" to the tragic poet.[21]
Perseus on Pegasus
-
For more details on this topic, see Perseus.
The replacement of Bellerophon by the more familiar culture hero Perseus was a development of Classical times that was standardized during the Middle Ages and has been adopted
by the European poets of the Renaissance and later.[22]
Bellerophon in popular culture
- In The Concept of Anxiety, Søren
Kierkegaard wrote that Bellerophon "sat calmly on his Pegasus in the service of the idea but fell when he wanted to
misuse Pegasus by riding the horse to a rendezvous with a mortal woman."[23]
- This mythical character's name is also used by the Japanese game/anime Fate/Stay
Night. Bellerophon is the name of one of the character Rider's
special attacks, which takes form of a bridle (Bellerophon) she uses on a pegasus.
Rider's true identity is Medusa and according to legend, a pegasus springs to life from her neck upon her death, hence explaining
her stabbing her neck in one episode and also calling the name Bellerophon.
- "Bellerophon" is the name of a computer program used by geneticists and molecular biologists to detect invalid "chimera"
genetic sequences.
- The band Beirut, led by multi-instrumentalist and singer Zach Condon, released a song on their two-track ep Pompeii called
"Napoleon on the Bellerophon."
- The first planet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi, has been nicknamed
Bellerophon, as the star is in the constellation Pegasus.
Notes
- ^ Kerenyi 1959, p 75.
- ^ Iliad vi.155–203.
- ^ Kerenyi 1959 p 78 suggests that "sea-green" Glaucus is a double for
Poseidon, god of the sea, who looms behind many of the elements in Bellerophon's myth, not
least as the sire of Pegasus and of Chrysaor, but also as the protector of Bellerophon.
- ^ Kerenyi p 80.
- ^ See Joseph Campbell, The Hero
with a Thousand Faces.
- ^ The suggestion, made by Kerenyi and others, makes the name "Bellerophontes"
the "killer of Belleros", just as Hermes Argeiphontes is "Hermes the killer of Argus". Rhys
Carpenter, in "Argeiphontes: A Suggestion" American Journal of Archaeology 54.3 (July 1950), pp. 177-183, makes a
carefully-argued case for Bellerophontes as the "bane-slayer" of the "bane to mankind" in Iliad II.329, derived
from a rare Greek word έλλερον, explained by the grammarians as κακόν, "evil". This έλλερον is connected by J. Katz ('How to be a
Dragon in Indo-European: Hittite illuyankas and its Linguistic and Cultural Congeners in Latin, Greek, and Germanic', in: Mír
Curad. Studies in Honor of Calvert Watkins, ed. Jasanoff, Melchert, Oliver, Innsbruck 1998, 317–334) with a Hesychius golss ελυες "water animal", and an Indo-European word for "snake" or "dragon", cognate to English
eel, also found in Hittite Illuyanka, which would
make Bellerophon the dragon slayer of Indo-European myth, represented by
Indra slaying Vrtra in Indo-Aryan, and by Thor slaying the Midgard Serpent in Germanic. Robert Graves in
The Greek Myths rev. ed. 1960 suggested a translation "bearing darts"
- ^ In Iliad vi.
- ^ Euripides' tragedies Stheneboia
and Bellerophontes are lost.
- ^ This mytheme is most familiar in the
narrative of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. Robert Graves also notes the parallel in the Egyptian
Tale of Two Brothers and in the desire of Athamas' wife for Phrixus (Graves 1960, 70.2, 75.1).
- ^ The tablets "on which he had traced a number of devices with a deadly
meaning" constitute the only apparent reference to writing in the Iliad. Such a letter is termed a "bellerophontic"
letter; one such figures in a subplot of Shakespeare's Hamlet, bringing offstage death to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Such a letter figures in the earlier story of Sargon of
Akkad.
- ^ Kerenyi, loc. cit, quoting Apollodorus Mythographus, 2.7.4.
- ^ Description of Greece1.4.6.
- ^ Some of the red-figure
pottery painters show Bellerophon wielding Poseidon's trident instead (Kerenyi, loc. cit.).
- ^ Hesiod, Theogony 319ff; Bibliotheke, ii.3.2;
Pindar, Olympian Odes, xiii.63ff; Pausanias, ii.4.1; Hyginus, Fabulae, 157;
John Tzetzes, On Lycophron.
- ^ Robert Graves, 75.d; Plutarch, On the Virtues of Women.
- ^ The inheritance of kingship through the king's daughter, with many heroic
instances, was discussed by Margalit Finkelberg, "Royal succession in heroic Greece" The Classical Quarterly New Series
41.2 (1991), pp. 303-316; compare Orion and Merope.
- ^ Isander was struck down by Ares in battle with the Solymi (Iliad
xvi.
- ^ Iliad loc. cit.
- ^ Parallels are in the myths of Icarus and Phaeton.
- ^ Pindar, Olympian Odes, xiii.87–90, and Isthmian Odes,
vii.44; Bibliotheke ii.3.2; Homer, Iliad vi.155–203
and xvi.328; Ovid, Metamorphoses ix.646.
- ^ Christoph Riedweg, "The 'atheistic' fragment from Euripides'
Bellerophontes (286 N²)", ICS 15.1 (1990).
- ^ George Burke Johnston "Jonson's
'Perseus upon Pegasus'" The Review of English Studies New Series, 6.21 (Jan., 1955), pp. 65-67.
- ^ The Concept of Anxiety,
Princeton University Press, 1980, ISBN 0-691-02011-6, p.150.
References
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