Pegasus

Loading this page…

Names & Creature Profile

Pegasus, also written Pegasos, is the winged horse linked with Bellerophon, spring water and the celestial Horse. Strabo places his extraordinary birth at Medusa’s beheading: he emerges from her severed neck. The horse then enters another hero’s adventure. At Corinth, Bellerophon catches him as he drinks from Peirene. The horse’s birth and his meeting with a rider belong to different episodes of his life. [3]

Historical Record

Pindar’s Olympian 13 celebrates the athlete Xenophon and praises Corinth, placing Pegasus beside the city’s achievements and its divine Order, Justice and Peace. The capture is part of that civic praise. Bellerophon has repeatedly failed to take the horse before Athena appears in his dream with the golden bridle and instructions for a sacrifice. [4]

Awake, he finds the bridle beside him and consults a seer. He sacrifices a white bull to his father Poseidon and raises an altar to Athena Hippia. Only then does he put the bit into the horse’s mouth and mount. Pegasus carries him into the air with bronze weapons against the Amazons, the Solymi and the fire-breathing Chimera. At the close of the episode, Pindar gives the companions separate futures: he declines to recount Bellerophon’s fate, while Pegasus goes to the stalls of Zeus. [4]

Tales & Encounters

Hawthorne’s The Chimaera gives Bellerophon a long wait at Pirene. He already possesses the jeweled golden bridle, but the horse remains beyond his grasp. Adults doubt that Pegasus exists; a child keeps him company and believes the winged horse will return. One day, after their simple meal beside the water, the child sees a reflection that Bellerophon first mistakes for a bird. Pegasus descends, drinks and grazes. Bellerophon waits until the horse rises from rolling on the ground, then springs onto his back. The encounter depends on the child’s attention and on the rider recognizing his moment. [7]

Pegasus resists with his whole flying body. He dives, turns and tries to throw Bellerophon; the rider holds on until he can put the golden bit into the horse’s mouth. Mastery brings a disturbing result: the subdued animal’s eyes fill with tears. Bellerophon speaks gently and strokes him, but at Mount Helicon he goes further. He removes the bit and offers Pegasus a choice between leaving and loving him. The horse flies away until he is only a distant brightness, then returns. That night Bellerophon sleeps beside him with an arm around his neck. [7]

Their subsequent battle with the Chimera tests the companionship in motion. Pegasus avoids the monster’s attacks as Bellerophon strikes, yet both are wounded. At the last, the creature leaps onto the horse and clings to him with its serpent tail. Pegasus carries the struggle higher while Bellerophon drives his sword into its heart. The monster falls; the surviving companions return to Pirene. The aerial victory depends upon the horse remaining in the fight, including the moment when flight no longer puts him safely beyond the enemy’s reach. [7]

Back at the fountain, the child has kept waiting. Bellerophon credits that trust with making the victory possible and again removes the bridle, this time offering Pegasus freedom forever. The horse rests his head on Bellerophon’s shoulder and chooses to remain. Hawthorne ends the boy’s future differently: he becomes a poet, whose imaginative flights the narrator values above victories over monsters. The creature’s story reaches two outcomes, a friendship freely continued and a child’s patient faith becoming creative power.

Later Retellings & Reception

Longfellow’s Pegasus in Pound begins with a wandering golden-maned horse whom village authorities confine and offer for sale. Visitors admire the marvel, but no one provides food, shelter or straw. At midnight, Pegasus breaks his chain and rises toward the stars. Morning brings more than an empty enclosure: a spring flows from the hoof-marks in the grass. Its lasting water strengthens those who drink, while the sound of the spring soothes them. The poem’s practical village cannot accommodate the horse, yet receives an enduring benefit from his visit. [8]

Odilon Redon’s Pegasus and Bellerophon, dated about 1888, makes the horse tower over the man. The Metropolitan Museum describes traces of corrections that give the wings a quivering energy, with light produced by erasure and white heightening against charcoal darkness. That unsettled form gives flight a visual anticipation: the horse seems capable of moving beyond the figure who would command him. The earlier wing positions participate in the effect instead of disappearing beneath a perfectly fixed outline. [11]

Paul Manship’s small Bellerophon and Pegasus of 1930 concentrates on bodily resistance. The sculpture combines bronze, gilding and lapis lazuli; a sturdy male figure strains to steady the horse’s muscular flanks and wings. Where Redon makes the animal loom in a mysterious dark, Manship makes command an effort that can be read through the rider’s posture. Both works give the horse a force beyond passive transport, while choosing different materials and physical relationships to express it. [12][11]

Appearance & Signs

Hawthorne gives Pegasus a white coat and silvery wings. His resting horse crops clover and rolls on the grass; his flying horse dives and turns with enough force to test the rider’s grip. Ordinary equine movement makes the impossible animal recognizable. The white and silver belong to this nineteenth-century literary rendering, while Corinthian coins convey the figure through the curled shape of a wing. [7][9]

Aratus’ description demands a different kind of looking. The Horse’s belly lies near Andromeda’s head, and four conspicuous stars form a square. Its head and neck are fainter, except for the bright point at the nostril. The figure stops at the navel. Here recognisability comes from selected lights and their relations, not from a fully drawn pair of wings, four legs and a sweeping tail. [1]

Homeland & Tradition

Corinth gives Pegasus a civic setting. A silver stater in the British Museum, dated 555–515 BCE, shows a bridled Pegasus walking to the left, its wing curled above its body. A late-fourth-century BCE Corinthian silver coin at the Spurlock Museum pairs Pegasus with a helmeted Athena on the other side. Across those dates, the horse remains a public emblem, small enough to circulate in a hand. [9][10]

Pausanias describes a Corinthian sanctuary of Athena Chalinitis, the Bridler. He relates that Athena tamed and bridled Pegasus before handing him to Bellerophon. The sanctuary stood by the theater; the goddess’s image combined a wooden body with a white-marble face, hands and feet. A wonder often remembered as a rider’s achievement is here also an act of divine assistance. The local religious title remembers the bringing of a formidable animal within reach. [2]

Nature & Powers

Flight does not guarantee the rider’s survival. In Astronomica 2.18, attributed to Hyginus, Bellerophon approaches heaven, looks down in fear and falls to his death; Pegasus receives a place among the stars. Bulfinch instead makes presumption provoke Jupiter’s gadfly, which stings the horse and throws a rider left blind and lame. Pindar declines to tell the rider’s ending at all. These are three different conclusions: fatal fear, divine punishment followed by suffering, and a deliberate poetic silence. A single ascent cannot contain all three endings. [5][6][4]

Landscape & Associations

Strabo places the capture beside Peirene at Corinth. In his account, Pegasus comes to drink and Bellerophon catches him there. Strabo also discusses the water itself: a spring on Acrocorinth remains full without overflowing, while the lower city’s supply is related to water passing through the hill. His treatment sets an inherited marvel alongside attention to an actual landscape. A spring can sustain both a city’s water and a story attached to that water. [3]

Helicon’s Horse Fountain belongs to another landscape. Aratus recounts the story that the horse struck the mountain and water welled from the hoof’s impression; the shepherds of Thespiae still used the fountain’s name in his account. Corinth’s drinking place and Helicon’s hoof-created spring are distinct settings. Their shared watery associations make them easy to combine in memory, although they play different parts in the surviving narratives. [1]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Hyginus records an alternative explanation for the celestial Horse that concerns Melanippe, daughter of Chiron, rather than Pegasus. Concealment, pregnancy and transformation shape that account. The collection also reports other explanations for her change into a mare. Such alternatives matter because a named constellation can gather competing stories. The familiar winged horse does not erase the other figure placed under the same celestial sign. [5]

The Gorgons and the Chimera belong beside Pegasus for different reasons. Medusa’s beheading is his origin in Strabo, whereas the Chimera is an adversary encountered by Bellerophon with his help. Griffin and Unicorn offer comparisons of form: each makes a recognizable animal extraordinary, though neither comparison supplies another version of Pegasus’s life. A winged companion, a composite guardian and a horned creature lead the reader into different narrative histories. The resemblance is a useful question to pursue, rather than a family tree. [3][4]

Meaning & Belief

Pausanias’s Corinthian waterworks give Pegasus a physical presence within the city. After describing Peirene, he records another notable fountain beside an image of Artemis near the baths. Above this fountain stands Bellerophon, and water passes through Pegasus’s hoof. It is a separate installation from the Peirene chambers and open-air well described earlier. The horse thus enters daily experience through sculpture and flowing water, while the drinking place of the capture remains another part of the city’s remembered landscape. [2]

The horse’s freedom also changes meaning between Hawthorne and Longfellow. Hawthorne lets Pegasus return to a person who has removed his bridle, so release strengthens a chosen relationship. Longfellow lets him leave the pound altogether, and the spring benefits people who failed to care for him. Neither ending requires the community to capture the creature successfully. Affection in one work and a gift in the other survive because the extraordinary visitor can go. [7][8]

Evidence & Open Questions

The Corinthian coins date particular images of Pegasus, rather than the composition of every story associated with him. A winged horse on silver can establish the image’s presence in a city’s coinage without revealing which account its makers or users knew. The visual and literary records illuminate different parts of the creature’s history. [9][10]

The earthly horse is equally dependent on the form in which he reaches us: a victory song, a city fountain, a small silver coin. The water installation described by Pausanias preserves a particularly tangible encounter. A person visiting the baths could find Bellerophon raised above a fountain and Pegasus still giving water through his hoof. The story had become part of the city’s working landscape. [2][4][9]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

For the difficult capture and the horse’s separate future, begin with Pindar’s Olympian 13. Read Aratus and Hyginus beside one another for the celestial Horse, and Pausanias with Strabo for the distinct Corinthian water settings. Bulfinch supplies the gadfly ending; Hawthorne develops capture into a freely continued friendship; Longfellow turns departure into a lasting spring. The museum records bring the horse onto coins and into Redon’s drawing and Manship’s sculpture. [4][1][5][2][3][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Phaenomena ↗
Aratus · Theoi Classical Texts Library · 1921 · Loeb Classical Library 129 · English translation of Greek · Translated by G. R. Mair
205–224
Checked 2026-10-11

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

A white winged horse lowers its head toward a clover-edged spring. — Pegasus at a spring, drawing on Hawthorne’s white horse with silvery wings; the reflected light and quiet composition are original interpretations.

Return to the Bestiary ↑

Loading Luminary Oddities