Pegasus Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Pegasus trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Pegasus trivia for anyone who knows the winged horse from a Disney film, a petrol-station sign or a night sky chart and wants the whole story. The quiz opens with the myth as the Greeks told it: Pegasus springing from Medusa's severed neck alongside his brother Chrysaor, Poseidon as his sire, the spring on Mount Helicon struck open by his hoof, Athena's golden bridle, Bellerophon's ride against the Chimera, and the gadfly Zeus sent to end that hero's flight to Olympus. From there it heads upward. Pegasus was one of Ptolemy's 48 constellations, and its Great Square, its brightest star Enif, the globular cluster M15 and 51 Pegasi b - the first planet found orbiting a Sun-like star, and a Nobel Prize in 2019 - all get questions. So do the modern lives of the horse: the Mobil flying red horse over Dallas, the TriStar Pictures logo, British airborne forces and Pegasus Bridge, the NSO Group's spyware, the world's richest horse race, and Pegasus in Hercules, Clash of the Titans, Fantasia and Barbie. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Greek mythology and Poseidon quizzes.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Through his link with the Muses, Pegasus became a modern symbol of inspiration in which art?
Poetry
Poetry: the 'poets' horse' image is mostly modern, because ancient myth tied Pegasus to the Muses only through a spring of theirs that he created.
Q 02Pegasus was born from the blood of which monster as she died?
Medusa
Medusa was the only mortal one of the three Gorgon sisters, so she was the only one a hero could kill; Stheno and Euryale could not die.
Q 03Which god sired Pegasus, in his role as god of horses?
Poseidon
Poseidon ruled horses and the sea alike, and in one Arcadian myth he turned himself into a stallion to pursue the goddess Demeter.
Q 04Which brother of Pegasus, born at the same moment, has a name meaning 'golden sword'?
Chrysaor
Chrysaor got the name because, the myth says, he sprang out already holding a golden blade; he went on to father three-bodied Geryon, whom Heracles killed.
Q 05An ancient derivation ties Pegasus's name to his watery birthplace, from a Greek word meaning what?
A well
A well, or spring: the Greek word is pege, though this may be a folk etymology, since the name's ending points to a non-Greek origin.
Q 06The spring Hippocrene, sacred to the Muses, was said to have formed when Pegasus did what?
Struck his hoof on the ground
Struck his hoof on the ground: in one telling the Muses' mountain was swelling skyward in delight at their singing, and Pegasus kicked its summit to stop it.
Q 07The Hippocrene spring lies on which mountain?
Helicon
Helicon was the Muses' home, so its horse-made spring was said to inspire anyone who drank from it; the name Hippocrene simply means 'horse's fountain'.
Q 08Bellerophon carried a sealed letter to King Iobates asking the king to do what?
Kill the bearer
Kill the bearer, it said, but Iobates had already feasted his guest for nine days and feared the taboo on killing one, so he sent him on a supposedly fatal monster hunt instead.
Q 09What did Athena give Bellerophon to help him tame Pegasus?
A golden bridle
A golden bridle lay beside him when he woke: the seer Polyeidos had told him to sleep in Athena's temple, and the goddess handed it to him in a dream.
Q 10Bellerophon caught Pegasus drinking at the Pirene spring in which Greek city, the hero's home?
Corinth
Corinth made the winged horse its civic badge and stamped him on its silver coins; Bellerophon was a grandson of its founder-king Sisyphus, the boulder-roller of myth.
Q 11Riding Pegasus, Bellerophon killed which fire-breathing monster?
The Chimera
The Chimera died, in one version, when he drove a lead-tipped spear down its throat and its own fiery breath melted the metal and choked it.
Q 12The fire-breathing beast Bellerophon slew is shown as a lion with a serpent's tail and which animal's head on its back?
A goat
A goat's head rose from the middle of its back, and in some ancient descriptions that head, not the lion's, was the one that breathed the fire.
Q 13After Bellerophon survived every deadly errand, Iobates of Lycia gave him his daughter's hand and what else?
Half his kingdom
Half his kingdom went with the bride in the oldest telling, because the king decided that a man who came through all that must be the child of a god.
Q 21The Great Square of Pegasus is completed by a star that officially belongs to which constellation?
Andromeda
Andromeda now owns the star Alpheratz outright, but the ancient Greeks counted it twice, as both the horse's navel and the top of the chained princess's head.
Q 22Maximillion Pegasus, a game inventor whose left eye is a magical ancient relic, appears in which anime?
Yu-Gi-Oh
Yu-Gi-Oh makes him the creator of Duel Monsters, the card game the whole series turns on, which he modelled on a mysterious game played in ancient Egypt.
Q 23The Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine, with four swivelling nozzles, lets which warplane take off straight up?
The Harrier
The Harrier needed no runway, and that was the point: in wartime it was meant to leave its vulnerable airfields and fight from rough strips and hidden clearings.
Q 14What did Zeus send to make Pegasus throw Bellerophon when the hero tried to fly to Olympus?
A gadfly
A gadfly stung Pegasus so that he reared and threw his rider, and in the oldest telling the hero ends his days wandering the Aleian plain alone, shunning other people.
Q 15After reaching Olympus, Pegasus was given what job by Zeus?
Carrying his thunderbolts
Carrying his thunderbolts was the horse's work on Olympus, and for that faithful service Zeus later set him among the stars.
Q 16Which Greek poet of around 700 BC tells how Pegasus was born?
Hesiod
Hesiod's other famous poem, Works and Days, is farming advice aimed at his brother Perses, urging him to drop their quarrel and get back to work.
Q 17Which defeated ruler surrendered to the British aboard HMS Bellerophon, a warship named after Pegasus's rider?
Napoleon
Napoleon had fled to the port of Rochefort hoping to sail for America, but the Royal Navy had it blockaded, so he gave himself up to the ship's captain instead.
Q 18Bellerophon's grandson Glaucus tells the hero's story to an enemy warrior in which epic poem?
The Iliad
The Iliad has Glaucus tell it to his Greek enemy Diomedes, and when the pair find their grandfathers were friends they swap armour, gold for bronze, instead of fighting.
Q 19Pegasus is one of the 48 constellations catalogued by which 2nd-century astronomer?
Ptolemy
Ptolemy listed them in his Almagest around AD 150, and all but one are still in official use today: only the great ship Argo was later broken up, into three smaller constellations.
Q 20The constellation Pegasus traditionally shows only which part of the winged horse?
The front half
The front half is all the sky shows, and one ancient telling said the figure was not Pegasus at all but Melanippe, a centaur's daughter who was turned into a mare.
Q 2451 Pegasi b, discovered in 1995, was the first exoplanet found orbiting what?
A Sun-like star
A Sun-like star should not, by the theories of 1995, have had a giant planet circling it every four days, far inside Mercury's distance, so astronomers had to rethink how planets form.
Q 25Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who discovered 51 Pegasi b, shared which honour in 2019?
The Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics was split that year: half went to the cosmologist James Peebles and the pair shared the rest, for a planet they spotted by the tiny wobble it gives its star.
Q 2651 Pegasi b is officially Dimidium, Latin for 'half', for having about half the mass of which planet?
Jupiter
Jupiter is the yardstick, and astronomers did not pick the name: a Swiss astronomy club proposed it, and it won a worldwide public vote that drew over half a million votes in 2015.
Q 27The angels at the start of which Christmas film are based on images of Stephan's Quintet, a galaxy group in Pegasus?
It's a Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life used it for heaven, yet the quintet is partly an illusion: only four of the galaxies truly travel together, and the fifth sits far in the foreground, much closer to Earth.
Q 28In 2022, a huge mosaic of Stephan's Quintet in Pegasus was among the first colour images from which space telescope?
James Webb
James Webb's mosaic, its largest image at the time, caught huge shock waves spreading through the group as one of the galaxies smashes its way through the others.
Q 29Einstein's Cross, in Pegasus, is a quasar whose light has been split into four images by what?
Gravitational lensing by a galaxy
Gravitational lensing by a galaxy works because mass bends light, as general relativity predicted, and here the lens lies 400 million light-years away, twenty times nearer than the quasar behind it.
Q 30British airborne troops, whose emblem shows Bellerophon riding Pegasus, wear berets of which colour?
Maroon
Maroon berets first went into action in North Africa in late 1942, and the German troops who fought the paratroops there gave them a nickname that stuck, the Red Devils.