The Spring, the Fall, and the Constellation

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.