Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/154

 i22 HISTORY OF GREECE. and beauty of Bellerophon rendered him the object of a strong passion on the part of the Anteia, wife of Prcetos king of Argos. Finding her advances rejected, she contracted a violent hatred towards him, and endeavored by false accusations to prevail upon her husband to kill him. Proetos refused to commit the deed under his own roof, but despatched him to his son-in-law the king of Lykia in Asia Minor, putting into his hands a folded tablet full of destructive symbols. Conformably to these suggestions, the most perilous undertakings were imposed upon Bellerophon. He was directed to attack the monster Chimaera and to conquer the warlike Solymi as well as the Amazons : as he returned victorious from these enterprises, an ambuscade was laid for him by the bravest Lykian warriors, all of whom he slew. At length the Lykian king recognized him "as the genuine son of a god," and gave him his daughter in marriage together with half of his kingdom. The grand-children of Bellerophon, Glaukos and Sar- pedon, the latter a son of his daughter Laodameia by Zeus, combat as allies of Troy against the host of Agamemnon ' Respecting the winged Pegasus, Homer says nothing ; but later poets assigned to Bellerophon this miraculous steed, whose parentage is given in the Hesiodic Theogony, as the instrument both of his voyage and of his success. 2 Heroic worship was paid at Corinth to Bellerophon, and he seems to have been a favorite theme of recollection not only among the Corinthians themselves, but also among the numerous colonists whom they sent out to other regions. 3 From Ornytion, the son of Sisyphus, we are conducted through a series of three undistinguished family names, Thoas, Darno- phon, and the brothers Propodas and Hyanthidas, to the time Hippios, a separate personification of one of the attributes of the god Posei- don. For this conjecture he gives some plausible grounds (Mythologic dcs Japetisch. Geschlechts, p. 129 seq.). 1 Iliad, vi. 155-210. 2 Hesiod, Theogon. 283. 3 Pausan. ii. 2, 4. See Pindar, Olymp. xiii. 90, addressed to Xenophon the Corinthian, and the Adoniazusae of the Syracusan Theocritus, a poem in which common Syracusan life and feeling are so graphically depicted, Idyll iv. 91. roBro, 'Of nal 6 BMeputbuv Me^oirovvaoioT