In Homer[571] the end of Bellerophon is mysterious. After the episode with Sthenoboea, he goes to Lycia, is royally entertained, marries the king’s daughter, rules over a fair domain, begets three goodly children, and then, suddenly, without warning, without manifest cause, he comes to be ‘Hated of all the gods. And in the Aleïan plain apart He strayed, shunning men’s foot-prints, consuming his own heart.’ Homer, with a poet’s instinct for the romantic and mysterious, asks no questions; Pindar[572] with his Olympian prejudice saw in the downfall of Bellerophon the proper meed of ‘insolence.’ Bellerophon’s heart was ‘aflutter for things far-off,’ he had vainly longed for ‘The converse of high Zeus.’ But the mythographers knew the real reason of the madness and the wandering, knew of the old sin against the old order. Apollodorus[573] says: ‘Bellerophon, son of Glaukos, son of Sisyphos, having slain unwittingly his brother Deliades, or, as some say, Peiren, and others Alkimenes, came to Proetus and was purified.’ On Bellerophon lay the _taboo_ of blood guilt. He came to Proetus, but, the sequel shows, was _not_ purified. In those old days he _could_ not be. Proetus sent him on to the king of Lycia, and the king of Lycia drove him yet further to the only land where he could dwell, the Aleïan or Cilician plain[574]. This Aleïan plain was, like the mouth of the Acheloüs, _new land_, an alluvial deposit slowly recovered from the sea, ultimately in Strabo’s time most fertile, but in Bellerophon’s days a desolate salt-marsh. The madness of Bellerophon—for in Homer he is obviously mad—is the madness of Orestes, of the man blood-stained, Erinys-haunted; but the story of Bellerophon, like that of Alcmaeon, looks back to days even before the Erinys was formulated as a personality, to days when Earth herself was polluted, poisoned by shed blood. * * * * *