The Tale of Laodamia and Protesilaus

At a Glance

• Central figures: Protesilaus, a Thessalian prince and the first Greek warrior to die at Troy; and Laodamia, his wife, whose grief drove her to beg the gods for one final reunion.
• Setting: Greece and the shores of Troy, during the opening days of the Trojan War. The myth is part of the Greek tradition surrounding the heroes who sailed with Agamemnon.
• The turn: The gods grant Laodamia’s prayer and allow Protesilaus to return from the Underworld - but only for a brief time, after which he must go back to the dead.
• The outcome: When Protesilaus departs a second time, Laodamia cannot endure the separation and takes her own life, following him into death.
• The legacy: Laodamia’s grief left behind the bronze likeness she made of Protesilaus - an image she kept and mourned over until her end.

The prophecy was known before the ships left Greece. The first Greek warrior to set foot on Trojan soil would die. Every commander on that fleet understood it. Protesilaus understood it. When the ships ground against the shore and the water foamed around the hulls, he was still the one who jumped.

He was a Thessalian prince, one of the Greek leaders who had brought his men across the Aegean to help take back Helen. Whether it was courage, duty, or something darker - a fatalism that had settled into him during the long voyage - he leaped before anyone else, and his sandals hit the shore of Troy first. The prophecy did not wait. Hector, greatest of the Trojans, cut him down almost immediately. The other Greeks followed, and the siege began its long, grinding ten-year course. But Protesilaus was already dead, and Laodamia was already a widow, though she did not yet know it.

The News from Troy

She had prayed for him every day he was gone. When he sailed, she had prayed to every god she knew that the prophecy would somehow bend, that the fates would find someone else, that the words spoken before the expedition left Hellas were not as fixed as everyone said. The prayers did not help. When word came back that the first Greek to land on Trojan soil had died as predicted, she knew whose name would follow.

Laodamia’s grief was not the quiet kind. She did not withdraw into mourning and learn to carry it. She was undone. She had loved Protesilaus with the force of someone who had expected a lifetime with him, and what she got instead was a few months of marriage before the war pulled him away forever. The gods, she believed, owed her something. She prayed again - not for his return to life, she was not foolish enough to ask for that - but for one more hour. One more moment. Just to see him again, to touch his face, to speak to him once more before the distance between the living and the dead became permanent.

Hermes at the Threshold

The gods heard her, or at least some of them did. Hermes, who guides the dead and knows the roads between the worlds, was sent - or came - to bring Protesilaus back for a short time. Not fully alive, not restored to flesh and breath in any permanent sense, but present. A form that could be seen. That could be touched.

He came back to her.

Whatever passed between them in that meeting, the myth keeps close. Laodamia held him. She knew, even while she held him, that she was counting the moments, that each one was one fewer remaining. This is what the gods had given her: not comfort, but a precise awareness of how much she was about to lose a second time. The reunion was joy and torment at once, inseparable.

When the time came for Protesilaus to return to the Underworld, he went. There was no arguing with that boundary. He had been lent to her, briefly, and now the debt was called in. Laodamia watched him go.

The Bronze Likeness

After the second departure, something in her broke that had not broken the first time. The first time, she had not seen his face again. Now she had, and she could not forget it, and she could not stop reaching for something that was no longer there.

She had a statue made - a bronze likeness of Protesilaus. She kept it in her rooms and spent her days beside it. She spoke to it. She touched it the way she had touched him during the brief reunion. Her family watched this and did not know what to do with what they saw. It was devotion and it was grief and it was something that sat uncomfortably between the two.

The bronze could not give her what she needed. No object could. She knew this, and still she stayed beside it, because the alternative - putting it away, moving forward, living the rest of her life in the ordinary way that people live after loss - was something she could not bring herself to do. Protesilaus was dead, and she had touched his face again, and the world after that was too empty to inhabit.

The Pyre

She did not linger indefinitely. The versions of the story that have come down do not all agree on the exact manner of her death - some say she stabbed herself, others that she stepped into a funeral pyre lit in Protesilaus’s honor - but they agree on the fact of it. Laodamia chose to follow him.

The choice was not made in a moment of impulse but after a period of deliberate grief, a grief that had worn down every reason to stay. She had prayed for one more hour with him, and the gods had given it, and the giving had only made the absence larger. She went to find him in the Underworld, where the distance would finally close.

Behind her she left the bronze figure - a man’s likeness in metal, standing in an empty room, still carrying the shape of someone who had jumped from a ship onto enemy sand and died before the war was an hour old.