Pegasus, the Winged Horse Born from the Blood of Medusa

Among the creatures of Greek mythology, Pegasus is one of the few that is not a monster. White and winged in the popular imagination, he is a divine horse, companion of heroes and dear to the Muses. Yet his origins are tied to one of the most terrible figures of myth, the Gorgon Medusa. His story, told by Hesiod, Pindar and Ovid, joins the violence of his birth to the light of poetry, and ends in the sky.

A Birth from the Gorgon

According to Hesiod's Theogony, when Perseus beheaded Medusa, there sprang from her neck Chrysaor, a warrior with a golden sword, and the horse Pegasus. The father of both was Poseidon, who had lain with the Gorgon. Hesiod links the name Pegasus to the springs of Ocean, in Greek pēgaí, near which he was said to have been born. Immediately after his birth the horse took flight, leaving the earth to reach the dwelling of the gods.

The poet adds that Pegasus lives in the halls of Zeus and brings the god his thunder and lightning. This role as bearer of the divine weapons sets him apart from ordinary animals and makes him a heavenly creature. His origin from the Gorgon's blood, on the other hand, reminds us that in Greek mythology beauty and terror are often linked, and that something precious can be born from the death of a monster.

Bellerophon and the Golden Bridle

Pegasus' most famous exploit is linked to the Corinthian hero Bellerophon. Pindar, in the thirteenth Olympian ode, tells that the young man long tried to catch the horse at the spring of Peirene, in Corinth, without success. Athena appeared to him in a dream and gave him a golden bridle; on waking Bellerophon really found it beside him, put it on Pegasus and was at last able to mount him.

On the back of the winged horse Bellerophon defeated the Chimera, the Amazons and the people of the Solymi. But when he tried to ride up to Olympus, Pegasus threw him, as Pindar recalls in the seventh Isthmian ode, and the hero fell to earth. The horse instead continued his flight and was welcomed among the gods. Corinth adopted Pegasus as its civic symbol, and for centuries its silver staters bore his image.

The Spring of the Muses and the Constellation

Another myth links Pegasus to poetry. On Mount Helicon, in Boeotia, the blow of his hoof was said to have made a spring gush forth, which was therefore called Hippocrene, the “horse's spring”. Ovid, in the fifth book of the Metamorphoses, tells that Athena climbed the mountain to see the new spring, and the Muses showed her the waters born from the stroke of the hoof. Drinking from that spring became an image of poetic inspiration.

The sky also preserves the memory of Pegasus: the constellation that bears his name, clearly visible on autumn nights in the northern hemisphere, can be recognised by a great square of stars. As early as the third century BC the poet Aratus described it as a horse of which only the front half can be seen. In the Renaissance Pegasus became an emblem dear to academies and printers, a symbol of fame in flight and of poetry rising upwards.

Pegasus sums up a parable typical of Greek myth: born from the death of a monster, he becomes the instrument of a hero's victory, then punishes his pride and finally finds a place among the stars. More than any other winged creature he has represented the human desire to rise, and at the same time the limit beyond which that desire becomes dangerous for those who cherish it.