The gift a goddess gives her favourite is a car that leaves the ground. In the Greek mythography called the Library (the Bibliotheca, compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), Demeter rewards Triptolemus with "a chariot of winged dragons" and a store of wheat, so that, "wafted through the sky, he sowed the whole inhabited earth": the first sower crossing the world by air, scattering grain from a flying seat. The same book keeps two more chariots that rise. Idas, to win Marpessa, "carried her off in a winged chariot which he received from Poseidon"; and Zeus, his strength restored, comes "riding in a chariot of winged horses" to pelt the monster Typhon with thunderbolts and drive him across the sky.

That the winged car was more than a phrase is confirmed by the editor's note to this edition. Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish anthropologist who Englished and annotated the Library, records that Triptolemus is "often represented in his dragon-car" in Greek vase-painting — the flying chariot was a picture the ancients carried in the eye, not only a line to be read.

Every witness wired here, though, is Greek, and all three sit within this single book; the Irish telling filed beside them, and the wandering tale-type of the borrowed wings, wait unread. Still, three riders is enough to show the shape's reach — a divine reward, an abductor's escape, a war-god's descent — all answering the one wish: to harness wings to a chariot and take the road no road touches. When the wings belong not to the rider but to the vehicle he borrows, whose flight is it — the hero's, or the god who lent the car?