Iliad 6 contains the oldest surviving reference to writing in Greek literature, and it is a story about a letter that orders its own bearer's death.
Bellerophon, exiled to Tiryns, was propositioned by Anteia, the wife of King Proetus, and refused her. She told her husband that Bellerophon had assaulted her. Proetus would not kill a guest himself — the taboo was absolute — so he sent him to his father-in-law, the king of Lycia, carrying a folded tablet in which he had scratched sēmata lygra, "baleful signs", with instructions that the bearer be killed.
Homer's phrase is deliberately vague and has been argued over for centuries: whether sēmata means alphabetic writing, some earlier script, or picture-signs is not resolvable from the text. What is clear is that the poet is describing marks on a folded tablet that carry a message a man cannot read about himself. The device — the letter of Uriah, as it is usually called after the parallel in the Book of Samuel — begins here for European literature.
The Lycian king entertained him for nine days and only on the tenth read the tablet. Unwilling to kill a guest either, he set him tasks instead.
The Chimera
The first task was the Chimera, a fire-breathing composite whose parts Homer itemises front to back. Homer says only that he killed it, trusting in the signs of the gods.
The method comes from later sources and is the best detail in the story: he fixed a lump of lead on the point of his spear and thrust it between the creature's jaws, letting the monster's own breath do the smelting; molten lead went down the throat and finished it from the inside. That is an unusually specific and technical solution, and it belongs with the small class of Greek monster-killings won by thinking rather than by strength.
Then the Solymi, whom Homer calls the hardest fight of his life; then the Amazons; then an ambush of the best men in Lycia laid on his way home, all of whom he killed. The king finally recognised him as divine-born, gave him his daughter and half the kingdom, and the Lycians granted him an estate of orchard and ploughland.
The horse, and the bridle
Homer does not mention Pegasus in this passage at all. Pindar supplies him, in the thirteenth Olympian, and the taming is a religious act rather than a feat of horsemanship: Bellerophon could not catch the winged horse until he slept beside the altar of Athena at Corinth, where the goddess appeared to him in a dream carrying a golden bridle and telling him to sacrifice a bull to Poseidon Damaios. He woke with the bridle actually in his hands. He founded an altar to Athena Chalinitis, Athena of the Bridle, and the horse accepted it.
Corinth claimed him as its own hero — the spring Peirene, where the taming happened, is a real Corinthian fountain house still visible, and Pegasus is on Corinthian coinage for centuries.
The fall
Then he tried to fly to Olympus, believing he belonged there. Zeus sent a gadfly, which stung the horse; it reared and threw him. Pindar refuses to describe what happened next, breaking off with the remark that it is not fitting to speak of it — one of the most effective silences in Greek poetry.
Homer, who does not mention the flight, gives the aftermath anyway and it is bleaker than the fall: when he became hateful to all the gods, he wandered alone over the Aleian plain, eating out his own heart and avoiding the paths of men. His son was killed by Ares, his daughter by Artemis.
That is the earliest surviving picture of a hero's old age as a depression, and it is delivered in six lines by a character explaining his own genealogy in the middle of a battle. Later sources add the lameness and the blindness.
Grandfather to a hero
The story is told in the Iliad by Glaucus, Bellerophon's grandson, to Diomedes on the battlefield, and the scene is one of the poem's most quoted. Diomedes asks who he is; Glaucus answers with the famous simile that the generations of men are like the generations of leaves, the wind scatters some on the ground and the forest grows others in the spring — and then tells the whole biography.
When he finishes, Diomedes plants his spear and says their grandfathers were guest-friends, so they cannot fight; they exchange armour instead, and Homer adds the drily accountant-like observation that Zeus must have taken away Glaucus' wits, because he swapped gold armour worth a hundred oxen for bronze worth nine. It is the Iliad's only joke about a bad trade, and it interrupts one of its most solemn passages.
Lycia, which is a real place
Unusually for a hero, his geography is concrete and archaeologically rich. Lycia, in southwestern Turkey, was a genuine and distinctive Bronze and Iron Age culture with its own language, and its rock-cut tombs and Xanthos inscriptions survive. Lycian dynasts put the Chimera and Pegasus on their coinage. The Yanartaş vents above Olympos, where methane seeping from the rock has burned continuously for millennia, were connected to the Chimera in antiquity.
Homer's Lycian material is one of several signs that the Iliad preserves real knowledge of the Anatolian coast, and Bellerophon's career reads in places like a Greek retelling of a local Lycian hero.
After antiquity
He has been comprehensively overshadowed by his horse. Modern audiences know Pegasus and generally attach him to Perseus, thanks to twentieth-century film, so Bellerophon has become the answer to a trivia question. Where he does survive it is usually as a name — a Royal Navy ship of the line that fought at the Nile and Trafalgar and later received Napoleon's surrender in 1815, a warship in Star Trek, a space vessel in various fictions, and the codename in the film Mission: Impossible II.
John Barth's novel Chimera (1972) is the substantial modern literary treatment, and it takes exactly the right angle: a middle-aged hero who has read the mythographers, knows what a heroic career is supposed to look like, and is trying to follow the specification.
A name, a disputed father, and a gadfly
What is buried inside the name Bellerophon?
Ancient sources explain it as "slayer of Belleros", a man he was said to have killed — hence his exile — and add that his original name was Hipponous. That looks like an invented etymology to account for a name nobody understood, and modern proposals are no more secure. His alternative form Bellerophontes contains the same -phontes, "slayer", element as in Argeiphontes, an epithet of Hermes.
Who was his father?
Both Glaucus of Corinth, a mortal king and son of Sisyphus, and Poseidon, in the standard double-paternity arrangement Greek heroes often have. The Poseidon claim matters because it explains his connection with horses, and because it is what he was appealing to when he tried to fly to Olympus.
Is the Anteia story the same as Potiphar's wife?
It is the same narrative type — the spurned older woman who accuses the young man — and it recurs across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Joseph and Potiphar's wife in Genesis, the Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers, Phaedra and Hippolytus, and others. Whether these are related by transmission or are independent instances of a common story pattern is debated; the Egyptian version is older than any surviving Greek one.
Why the gadfly?
Zeus' choice of instrument is pointedly small. Nothing about the punishment involves divine force: the king of the gods sends an insect, and the man's own mount throws him. The disproportion is the theology, and it is the same lesson delivered to Icarus, Phaethon and Salmoneus. Pindar's version frames the flight explicitly as wanting what is not one's own.