So, a lot of Greek heroes tend to have one specific fatal flaw: hubris, or excessive pride. And there are fewer Greek heroes hubrisier than Bellerophon.

Bellerophon is the son of Glaucus and Eurynome, the King and Queen of Corinth. Though it turns out that he’s not actually the son of Glaucus, since the queen had a little fling with Poseidon that produced our boy here. Though when one considers Poseidon’s rather loose relationship with the concept of consent, it’s entirely possible that “fling” might not be the right word to use here.

Anyway, things are going pretty well for Bellerophon. at least until he kills his brother for unknown reasons and gets himself banished. From here he goes to Argos, where he meets with King Proteus, who basically pardons him.

So Bellerophon is hanging around Argos, and pretty much living the good life. Then the queen of Argos decides that she needs to break herself off a piece of that. Bellerophon very much does not feel the same way, and the queen doesn’t take this rejection very well. By which I mean she goes to her husband and tells him that Bellerophon raped her.

Needless to say, Proteus is very, very angry, but because Bellerophon is his guest, he can’t just kill him without getting one of Zeus’s lightning bolts up his ass. He comes up with a rather ingenious solution to this: he’s going to have a big-ass monster kill Bellerophon for him.

So Proteus sends him after the Chimera: a monster with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and tail of a snake that breathes fire and has generally been causing some problems in the area. This way, at least one of Proteus’s problems will be solved.

Before heading off to the Chimera, though, Bellerophon pays a visit to a seer named Polyeidos. Polyeidos basically tells him that he’s screwed unless he manages to find and tame the Pegasus. Thankfully, he gets a little divine intervention: being the son of Poseidon makes him pretty good with horses, and Athena grants him a golden bridle.

So Bellerophon heads out, finds Pegasus, and manages to get the bridle on him when he bends down to drink from a well. From here on, they are BFFs.

Now that he has Pegasus, Bellerophon is now ready to hunt down the Chimera. There’s one small problem here, though: the flames the Chimera belches out make it very hard for Bellerophon to get close enough to hit it. Thankfully he has a solution to this problem. Basically he sticks a giant hunk of lead on his spear, which he jams into its mouth just as it’s about to do its thing. The lead melts, the Chimera suffocates, and that’s the end of that.

So Bellerophon’s made a name for himself, and goes on to have a bunch more adventures. He also gets himself a wife and has a couple of kids. But that’s not what we’re here for. No, now we’re going to get to the hubris part of the tale.

Bellerophon decides that he’s going to head up to Mount Olympus to kick it with his bio dad and the rest of the gods, thinking that he’s so awesome that surely they’d want to hang with him too. So he mounts Pegasus and heads off, but Zeus is not too happy with his nephew just thinking he can waltz in and sends a gadfly to sting his horse. Pegasus bucks Bellerophon off him, and he plummets to his death.

So the moral of the story here seems to be don’t just drop in on people uninvited.

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