According to all accounts the hoofs of this beautiful creature must have possessed not only miraculous strength but also some of the properties of a divining-rod, for, when thirsty, all that he needs must do was to strike his magic hoof upon the ground and up would spout a fountain or a spring—crystal clear and delightfully cool.
"He it was, men say, that brought down from lofty
Helicon the bright waters of bounteous Hippocrene."
The Fountain of Hippocrene was the result of an almost unbelievable exhibition of strength which occurred, as the story goes, at the time that the nine Muses and the nine daughters of Pierus engaged in a musical contest on Mount Helicon. When the nine daughters of Pierus began to sing, the heavens scowled and grew dark, but when the nine Muses lifted their voices in song, the skies grew gold with sunlight, the rivers stopped spellbound in their courses and Mount Helicon rose skyward in sheer delight. Neptune, observing the mountain, advised Pegasus to stop its ascension by kicking it with his hoof. The winged steed kicked and not only quenched the rising enthusiasm of Helicon, but caused the waters of Hippocrene to burst forth from the very crest of a vast rock. Poets were not long in discovering that a draught of these sparkling waters fired their minds with divine inspiration, and the beauty in their souls grew like flowers into poems which stayed fresh and fair through all succeeding centuries. No wonder modern poets sigh
"for a beaker full of the warm south
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking on the brim."
—Longfellow.
Twenty "stadia" below the Fountain lay the Grove of the Muses, situated in a pleasant hollow, while below this Grove, at the foot of Helicon, was the village of Ascra, the residence of Hesiod, and the earliest seat of poetry in Greece. One can imagine that the poets made frequent trips up the two miles or so that brought them to the Fountain of the Horse. In modern times, Hippocrene has been identified with a fine spring at Makariotissa.
The limpid spring of Pirene on the citadel of Corinth was also opened by a blow from the winged horse's foot. The water from Pirene was in later days conveyed down the hill by subterranean conduits into a marble basin made especially to hold it Pegasus was not given credit for having opened these springs, however, until the days of the Alexandrian poets. In lovely fancies, these "Spring-inspired" poets not only extolled the wondrous strength in the hoof of Pegasus as he cleft a chasm in the earth, but they also sang of so light a foot that he no more than shook the sweetness from the flowers.
For a long time Pegasus flew about Mount Helicon, adored by the Muses and admired by the gods, but finally one day, while drinking at a spring, he was captured by a Grecian youth named Bellerophon. After making him fast with a golden bridle loaned to him by Minerva, Bellerophon mounted the broad back, slipped his feet between the wings and soared to the sky. As might have been expected, Bellerophon henceforth spent a good part of his time along the dizzying heights above and around the clouds and one day accomplished the praiseworthy deed of swooping down and slaying a triple-headed monster which had been terrorizing all the surrounding land.
After this famous ride, Bellerophon seized what he considered a good opportunity and tried to ascend to the top of the broad summit of Mount Olympus which towered almost twice as high as the summit of Mount Helicon. But Mount Olympus was the abode of the gods and this presumptuous act so angered Jupiter that he sent an insect to torment the steed which reared backward and threw its rider to the earth. Being now quite accustomed to a rider, Pegasus was presented to Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn, whose duty it was to lift the curtain of night with her rosy tinted fingers and open the eastern gates for Apollo, the Sun-god. In art Aurora is often pictured as a spirited maiden in dazzling robes riding swiftly on the winged Pegasus, although she is also represented as rising out of the ocean in the east in a car drawn by four white horses. Perhaps she decided to employ the latter exclusively to usher in the dawn, for Pegasus was later transposed to the stars and never again permitted to stray earthward. His great dark sky square with a star on each corner is exceedingly easy to find especially during September when it is on the sky slope in the east, although if there is any difficulty in locating it, let the eye travel from Cassiopeia to the Segment of Perseus—which resembles a rod bent in the middle and swayed by the weight of this big chained Square.
The Square rises and sets in a tilted fashion with its corner star, Scheat, on the horse's knee, almost above Algenib, which lies on his wing.