Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Epeius.
The gallery
Relief from Samothrace: Agamemnon, Talthybios and Epeios
Unknown (Archaic Greek), c. 560 BC
This marble relief from the island of Samothrace, now in the Louvre (Ma 697), is one of the earliest securely identified images of Epeius. Three figures advance to the right, each labelled in archaic Ionic letters: Agamemnon, the herald Talthybios, and Epeios (Epeius). Often read as Agamemnon's initiation into the Samothracian mystery cult, and possibly carved as an armrest for the throne of a cult statue, the panel preserves the name of the future builder of the Trojan Horse a century before the great vase painters took up the theme.
The Building of the Trojan Horse
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, c. 1760
Tiepolo stages the most celebrated deed of Epeius: the construction of the great wooden horse outside the walls of Troy. Carpenters swarm over the half-finished beast, hauling timber and raising the towering frame, while the craftsman-hero who conceived it directs the labour that Athena inspired. One of a pair of canvases in the National Gallery, London (the companion shows the horse drawn into the city), the Rococo scene turns the climactic stratagem of the Trojan War into a bustling theatre of human ingenuity.
Epeius in the Iliupersis of Polygnotus (reconstruction)
Carl Robert, after Polygnotus, 1893 (after a lost wall painting of c. 460 BC)
A nineteenth-century scholarly reconstruction by Carl Robert of a section of Polygnotus's lost Iliupersis (the Sack of Troy), which decorated the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi. Pausanias, who saw the original, records that Epeius was shown in the act of throwing down the Trojan wall, above which rose the head of the wooden horse he had built. The drawing recovers, from ancient testimony, how one of antiquity's most famous fresco cycles portrayed the architect of Troy's downfall.