Pegasus opened springs with his hooves and hauled thunderbolts for Zeus
The winged horse of Greek myth was no mere mount. Wherever his hoof hit the ground, a spring of inspiring water gushed out, including the Muses' fountain on Mount Helicon. He carried Zeus's lightning, became a constellation, and much later lent his image to British paratroopers and a famous Normandy bridge.
Pegasus was the offspring of Poseidon, in his guise as horse god, and the Gorgon Medusa, and he emerged with his brother Chrysaor at the moment Perseus killed their mother. Accounts differ on the details: some have the pair spring from her neck, others from the earth where her blood fell, or from blood mixed with sea foam, which recalls the birth of Aphrodite. Hesiod places the event near the springs of Oceanus at the edge of the world.
His name has two competing explanations. Hesiod connected it to the Greek word for a spring or well. A 1952 proposal instead links it to a Luwian word for lightning and a thunder god of southern Cilicia, fitting Hesiod's report that Pegasus bore Zeus's thunderbolts; that view is still widely held, though the historian Robin Lane Fox called it implausible in 2009. The springs are central to his legend: Hippocrene, meaning horse spring, on Helicon, another at Troezen, and the Muses were even nicknamed Pegasides.
The hero Bellerophon tamed him with a golden bridle given by Athena in a dream, then rode him against the Chimera. Corinth, where Athena was worshipped as a horse-taming goddess, stamped Pegasus on its early coins. When Bellerophon tried to fly up to Olympus he fell, and Pegasus went on alone, joining Zeus's stables to carry thunderbolts beside the attendants Astrape and Bronte. For his service he was set among the stars, and one tale says a single feather drifted down near Tarsus.
The symbol has flown far. Benvenuto Cellini put Pegasus on a coin in 1537 honouring Cardinal Pietro Bembo, and the horse still appears on Tuscany's flag. In 1941 Britain's new parachute troops adopted Bellerophon on Pegasus as a sleeve badge, and the bridge over the Caen Canal seized by the 6th Airborne Division on the night of 5 to 6 June 1944 has been called Pegasus Bridge ever since. Mobil Oil and TriStar Pictures also chose the winged horse for their logos.
Source: Pegasus
