3.
Bellerophon, son of Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, having accidentally killed his brother
Deliades or, as some say, Piren, or, as others will have it, Alcimenes, came
to Proetus and was purified.1 And Stheneboea fell in love with
him,2 and sent him proposals for a meeting; and when he rejected them, she told
Proetus that Bellerophon had sent her a vicious proposal. Proetus believed her, and gave
him a letter to take to Iobates, in which it was written that he was to kill Bellerophon.
Having read the letter, Iobates ordered him to kill the Chimera, believing that he would
be destroyed by the beast, for it was more than a match for many, let alone one; it had
the fore part of a lion, the tail of a dragon, and its third head, the middle one, was
that of a goat, through which it belched fire. And it devastated the country and harried
the cattle; for it was a single creature with the power of three beasts. It is said, too,
that this Chimera was bred by Amisodarus, as Homer also affirms,3 and that it was begotten by Typhon on Echidna, as Hesiod relates.4
[2]
So Bellerophon mounted his winged steed
Pegasus, offspring of Medusa and Poseidon, and soaring on high shot down the Chimera from
the height.5 After that contest Iobates ordered him to fight
the Solymi, and when he had finished that task also, he commanded him to combat the
Amazons. And when he had killed them also, he picked out the reputed bravest of the
Lycians and bade them lay an ambush and slay him. But when Bellerophon had killed them
also to a man, Iobates, in admiration of his prowess, showed him the letter and begged him
to stay with him; moreover he gave him his daughter Philonoe,6 and dying
bequeathed to him the kingdom.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
1 Compare Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 17; Tzetzes, Chiliades vii.810ff.; Scholiast on Hom. Il. vi.155. According to one account, mentioned by these writers, Bellerophon received his name (meaning slayer of Bellerus) because he had slain a tyrant of Corinth called Bellerus.
2 In the following story of Bellerophon, our author follows Hom. Il. 6.155ff. (where the wife of Proetus is called Antia instead of Stheneboea). Compare Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 17; Tzetzes, Chiliades vii.816ff.; Zenobius, Cent. ii.87 (who probably followed Apollodorus); Hyginus, Fab. 57; Hyginus, Ast. ii.18; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. pp. 24, 119 (First Vatican Mythographer 71, 72; Second Vatican Mythographer 131). Euripides composed a tragedy on the subject called Stheneboea. See TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 567ff. According to Tzetzes (Scholiast on Lycophron 17), Iobates refrained from slaying Bellerophon with his own hand in virtue of an old custom which forbade those who had eaten together to kill each other.
5 For the combat of Bellerophon with the Chimera, see Hom. Il. 6.179ff.; Hes. Th. 319ff.; Pind. O. 13.84(120)ff. ; Hyginus, Fab. 57.
6 Anticlia, according to the Scholiast on Pind. O. 9.59(82); Cassandra, according to the Scholiast on Hom. Il. vi.155.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.