Bellerophon

Bellerophon was a prince of Corinth, and in many sources a son of Poseidon. His trouble began when the wife of a king who was hosting him made advances, was refused, and told her husband the opposite. Bound by the laws of hospitality not to kill a guest himself, the king sent him to a father-in-law with a sealed letter requesting his death — the oldest 'letter that condemns its carrier' in Western literature.

The father-in-law solved the problem by assignment. He sent Bellerophon against the Chimera, a fire-breathing hybrid nobody had survived. Bellerophon had one advantage: Athena had given him a golden bridle in a dream, and with it he caught and tamed the winged horse Pegasus at a spring.

From the air the Chimera's fire could not reach him, and he killed it with a lead-tipped spear that melted in its own throat. He was then sent against the Solymi and the Amazons, and survived both. Eventually the king gave up, showed him the letter, and married him to his daughter instead.

That is where it should have ended. Instead Bellerophon concluded that a man who had done all that belonged among the gods, and rode Pegasus up toward Olympus. Zeus sent a single gadfly. It stung the horse, the horse threw him, and he fell back to earth.

He survived the fall and wished he had not. Homer describes him wandering the Aleian plain alone, lame, eating his heart out and avoiding the paths of men. Pegasus completed the journey without him and stayed.