BELLEROPHON

Bellerophon with his horse Pegasus, stone bas-relief; in the Palazzo Spada, Rome also called Bellerophontes, hero in Greek legend. In the Iliad he was the son of Glaucus, who was the son of Sisyphus of Ephyre (traditionally Corinth). Anteia (or Stheneboea), wife of Proetus, the king of Argos, loved him; when her overtures were rejected, she falsely accused him to her husband. Proetus then sent Bellerophon to Iobates, the king of Lycia, with a message that he was to be slain. The king, repeatedly unsuccessful in his assassination attempts, finally recognized Bellerophon as more than human and married him to his daughter. Bellerophon lived in prosperity until he fell out of favour with the gods, lost two of his children, and wandered grief-stricken over the Aleian Plain. Later authors added that, while still at Corinth, Bellerophon tamed the winged horse Pegasus with a bridle given to him by Athena and that he used Pegasus to fight the Chimera and afterward to punish Anteia. He supposedly earned the wrath of the gods by trying to fly up to heaven and was thrown from Pegasus and lamed or, by some accounts, killed. Bellerophon's adventures were frequently represented in ancient art and formed the subject of the Iobates of Sophocles and of the Bellerophontes and Stheneboea of Euripides. extinct genus of gastropods (snails) found as fossils in rocks of Ordovician to Triassic age (between 208 and 505 million years old). Bellerophon is characteristic of the bellerophontids, a large group of snails. The shell of Bellerophon was primitive in that it was coiled with the midline in a single plane; the upper half of the shell was the mirror image of the lower half. In Bellerophon, growth lines angled away from a raised ridge along the midline of the shell. The anterior margins of the shell were flared outward, and they were separated by a narrow slit, called the selenizone.