The Spring of the Muses, and the Fall of the Rider

Where Pegasus struck the ground with his hoof on Mount Helicon, the spring Hippocrene, the horse's fountain, burst forth, sacred to the Muses, so that the winged horse became an emblem of poetic inspiration and of the imagination taking flight. The story ends as a warning against pride: Bellerophon, grown arrogant, tried to ride Pegasus up to Olympus itself, but Zeus sent a gadfly to sting the horse, which threw its rider back to earth to wander crippled and alone while Pegasus went on to the gods and was set among the stars as a constellation. Aspiration, inspiration and the danger of overreaching all gather to the winged horse.

The image has had a long modern afterlife detached from its myth: the British Army's airborne forces adopted a maroon shield bearing Bellerophon astride Pegasus as their formation insignia during the Second World War, a badge still worn by British parachute and glider units today, and the American oil company Mobil has used a red flying horse as its trademark since the 1930s, both cases drawing purely on the image of speed and flight rather than on the underlying story of pride and its fall. The horse-shaped star pattern the Greeks read as Pegasus is not read that way everywhere: traditional Chinese astronomy divides the same stars among several unrelated xingguan, star-officer groupings tied to a wall enclosure and a legendary flying corridor rather than to any horse, a reminder that a constellation's shape is a culturally specific way of connecting points of light, not a feature of the sky itself.