Protesilaus- Greek HeroHero

The First to Fall

An oracle had warned the Greeks that the first man to set foot on Trojan soil would be the first to die. The ships beached at the Troad, and no one moved. Protesilaus leapt from his vessel onto the sand.

Homer names him in the Catalogue of Ships as the leader of the contingent from Phylace, and says he was killed by "a Dardanian man" while leaping from his ship. Apollodorus gives the fuller account: Protesilaus cut down many Trojans before Hector killed him. He had left behind a half-built house in Phylace and a new wife, Laodamia, daughter of Acastus.

Laodamia

When news of his death reached Phylace, Laodamia could not accept it. She prayed to the gods for three hours with her husband. The gods granted it. Hermes led Protesilaus up from Hades, and for three hours he stood with her again in their unfinished house.

When the time ran out, Hermes took him back. Laodamia could not survive the second loss. In Apollodorus, she killed herself. Hyginus preserves a different version: she had fashioned a bronze image of Protesilaus and held it in her bed, and when her father Acastus discovered it and burned it, she threw herself onto the fire.

A hero-cult grew at Elaeus on the Thracian Chersonese, across the strait from Troy. Herodotus records that when the Persian governor Artayctes looted the shrine and plowed the sacred precinct, the Greeks executed him for it after Xerxes' defeat. The dead hero's ground was not to be touched.