Bellerophon and the Chimera
In brief
- Sent to Lycia carrying a sealed letter that asked the king to have him killed, Bellerophon was handed what was meant to be a fatal errand instead.
- The Chimera was lion in front, goat in the middle and serpent behind, and it breathed fire.
- With a golden bridle from Athena he caught and tamed Pegasus, attacked from above where the fire could not reach, and dropped a lead-tipped spear down its throat.
Bellerophon had come to Tiryns to be purified of an accidental killing, and the queen there took an interest he did not return. She told her husband he had assaulted her. Proetus would not kill a guest (that was Zeus's business, and the penalties were severe), so he sent him to Lycia to visit his father-in-law with a sealed letter, and the letter asked the king of Lycia to do it for him.
The Lycian king had the same scruple and the same solution. Rather than raise a hand himself, he sent the young man to deal with the Chimera, which was ravaging the country and which nobody had managed to get near. It was a single animal made of three: a lion's head and forequarters, a goat rising from the middle of its back, and a serpent for a tail. It breathed fire.
The problem was the range. Anything on foot burned before it got within a spear's length. Athena solved it by giving Bellerophon a golden bridle and telling him where Pegasus came to drink, and the winged horse let itself be caught with the bridle in his hand.
He fought it from the air, out of reach, until he could put a spear into it from directly above. Apollodorus adds a detail that reads like an engineer's: he fixed a lump of lead to the point, and the Chimera's own breath melted it in its throat. It burned from the inside and died on the slope that still carries its name.
