Pegasus

Pegasus springs from the neck of Medusa when Perseus beheads her, in Hesiod's account, together with his brother Chrysaor, the offspring, in the myth, of an earlier union with Poseidon, god of horses. His central story is with Bellerophon, whom he carries against the Chimera and who is thrown to ruin when he presumes to ride up to Olympus; Pegasus completes the ascent alone and becomes the bearer of Zeus's thunderbolts, later set among the stars as a constellation. A secondary tradition makes him the maker of the spring Hippocrene ("horse fountain") on Mount Helicon, struck from the rock by his hoof, which links him to the Muses and to poetic inspiration. That association is why "Pegasus" recurs as an emblem of poetry and soaring imagination, a usage that draws on one strand of the myth and leaves the tragic Bellerophon story aside.

Pegasus was also, from an early date, a civic emblem rather than purely a mythic figure: the coinage of ancient Corinth, Bellerophon's own city, carried his image for centuries, one of the most widely circulated equestrian types in the Greek world, precisely because the local hero's winged horse gave Corinth a recognisable badge distinct from every rival city's coin types. That civic and heraldic use anticipates, without directly causing, Pegasus's much later adoption as an emblem of inspiration and swift achievement in European and American commercial and institutional branding, a modern afterlife that draws on the Hippocrene strand of the myth while leaving Bellerophon's fall from grace, the myth's own original warning against presumption, almost entirely forgotten.

Pegasus is more useful to the tradition after the Gorgon episode than during it. On Helicon he strikes the ground with a hoof and the Hippocrene spring opens, and because that spring belongs to the Muses the horse becomes an emblem of poetic inspiration. That is the association that carried into Renaissance and later European use, and it is why a winged horse turns up on the title pages of books that have nothing to do with Greek myth.

Bellerophon rides him against the Chimaera and then overreaches. Attempting to ride to Olympus, he is thrown, and the horse continues without him. The moral is transparent and the tradition repeats it: the mount is divine and the rider is not. Zeus keeps Pegasus and, in the usual version, employs him to carry thunderbolts.

The constellation is the durable outcome. Pegasus is one of the forty-eight figures listed by Ptolemy and its great square is among the easiest patterns to find in a northern autumn sky. The star that once completed the square, Alpheratz, is now assigned to Andromeda, so the figure as drawn today borrows its corner from a neighbour. The horse also survives in commercial heraldry, where the winged-horse device has been used continuously for the better part of a century.