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Q: "What about the purification of your blood-guilt, sir?"

A: "Granted Pegasus, I inferred I was clear with Athene, who, Deliades having been her particular votary, I presumed to be the only god concerned."

Q: "How far up did Pegasus get this morning, sir?"

A: "Not above a meter. Our investigation of this problem, to which my administration gives the highest priority, continues, and you may expect a full report after the present digression."

Q: "In one of the earlier meetings of this course of lectures on the First Flood of the Distinguished History of Bellerophon the Mythic Hero, required of all members of the court of Bellerophon the King in hopes of alienating them from him in partial fulfillment of the fourth quadrant (Reign and Death) of the mythobiographic Pattern, describing your recent systematic abuse of Queen Philonoë, the Princes Hippolochus and Isander, and Princess Laodamia by prolix and tactless rehearsals of your childhood, you mentioned that writing — as a means of ordinary communication as opposed to a mode of magic — will not be introduced into Hellenic culture for some centuries yet except as borrowed in isolated instances from the future by seers like Polyeidus. Yet the 'labor' imposed on you by King Proetus was the delivery to your late father-in-law of a diplomatic message in epistolary form. Moreover, the lecture in which you made the aforementioned mention was itself, we recall with excitement, read from a written text, at least delivered from written notes, as have been all the lectures in this thrilling course — the very word lecture, I believe, comes from a barbaric root-verb meaning 'to read,' and reading, a priori, implies writing. Finally, our presence here in the University of Lycia's newly established Department of Classical Mythology, your stimulating requirement from us of term papers on The Story of Your Life Thus Far, et cetera, all suggest that we are, if not a literate society, at least a society to which reading and writing are not unknown. Is there not some discrepancy here?"

A: "Yes."

Q: "Several other things also perplex us, sir, researchers after truth that we are and in no way disaffected from our country, our king, or our university by, respectively, your prolongation of the Carian-Solymian war, your mistreatment of good King Iobates's gentle younger daughter, and your unseemly perversion of professorial privilege to the ends of self-aggrandizement and/or — abasement — all which we readily accept as the self-imposed rigors of the above-alluded-to Pattern. Are you not inclined, as we are, to see a seerly hand, perhaps Polyeidus's, in such apparent lapses of authorial control, even narrative coherence, as the presentation, before we've even heard today's lecture, of these Q's and A's, which in fact follow that lecture? Or the mysterious, to us very nearly unintelligible, text of the lecture itself, which reads:

"Good evening. On behalf of the mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth, I would like to thank [supply name of university, publisher, sponsor of reading, et cetera] for this opportunity to put straight a number of discrepancies and problematical details in the standard accounts of his life and work; to lay to rest certain items of disagreeable gossip concerning both his public and his private life; and to respond to any questions you may wish to put concerning his fabulous career.

"My general interest in the wandering-hero myth dates from my thirtieth year, when reviewers of my novel The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) remarked that the vicissitudes of its hero — Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Poet and Laureate of Maryland — follow in some detail the pattern of mythical heroic adventure as described by Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, and other comparative mythologists. The suggestion was that I had used this pattern as the basis for the novel's plot. In fact I'd been till then unaware of the pattern's existence; once apprised of it, I was struck enough by the coincidence (which I later came to regard as more inevitable than remarkable) to examine those works by which I'd allegedly been influenced, and my next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), was for better or worse the conscious and ironic orchestration of the Ur-Myth which its predecessor had been represented as being. Several of my subsequent fictions — the long short-story Menelaiad and the novella Perseid, for example — deal directly with particular manifestations of the myth of the wandering hero and address as well a number of their author's more current thematic concerns: the mortal desire for immortality, for instance, and its ironically qualified fulfillment — especially by the mythic hero's transformation, in the latter stages of his career, into the sound of his own voice, or the story of his life, or both. I am forty.

"Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations of our ordinary psychic experience and therefore point always to daily reality, to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoeic stick, however meritorious such fiction may be in other respects. Better to address the archetypes directly. To the objection that classical mythology, like the Bible, is no longer a staple of the average reader's education, and that, consequently, the old agonies of Oedipus or Antigone are without effect on contemporary sensibility, I reply, hum, I forget what, something about comedy and self-explanatory context. Anyhow, when I had completed the Perseid novella, my research after further classical examples of the aforementioned themes led me to the minor mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth.

"As it was among other things the very unfamiliarity of Bellerophon's story, even to those acquainted with the myths of Menelaus and Helen or Perseus and Andromeda, that I found appropriate to my purposes, a brief summary might be helpful. Here is Robert Grave's excellent account in The Greek Myths, itself a collation of the texts of Antoninus Liberalis, Apollodorus, Eustathius, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, the Scholiast on the Iliad, and Tzetzes:

"a. Bellerophon, son of Glaucus. . left Corinth under a cloud, having first killed one Bellerus — which earned him his nickname Bellerophontes, shortened to Bellerophon — and then his own brother, whose name is usually given as Deliades. He fled as a suppliant to Proetus, King of Tiryns; but. . Anteia, Proetus's wife. . fell in love with him at sight. When he rejected her advances, she accused him of having tried to seduce her, and Proetus, who believed the story, grew incensed. Yet he dared not risk the Furies' vengeance by the direct murder of a suppliant, and therefore sent him to Anteia's father Iobates, King of Lycia, carrying a sealed letter, which read: 'Pray remove the bearer from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter.'

"b. Iobates, equally loth to ill-treat a royal guest, asked Bellerophon to do him the service of destroying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing she-monster with lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail. . Before setting about the task, Bellerophon consulted the seer Polyeidus, and was advised to catch and tame the winged horse Pegasus, beloved by the Muses of Mount Helicon, for whom he had created the well Hippocrene by stamping his moon-shaped hoof.

"c. . Bellerophon found [Pegasus] drinking at Peirene. . another of his wells, and threw over his head a golden bridle, Athene's timely present. But some say that Athene gave Pegasus already bridled to Bellerophon; and others that Poseidon, who was really Bellerophon's father, did so. Be that as it may, Bellerophon overcame the Chimaera by flying above her on Pegasus's back, riddling her with arrows, and then thrusting between her jaws a lump of lead which he had fixed to the point of his spear. The Chimaera's fiery breath melted the lead, which trickled down her throat, searing her vitals.