Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Protesilaus.
The gallery
Protesilaos Advancing from a Ship's Prow (Silver Drachm of Thessalian Thebai)
Unknown (Thessalian mint), c. 302–286 BC
On the reverse of this silver drachm of Thessalian Thebai, Protesilaos advances in crested helmet and armor, shield on his left arm and sword raised, with the prow of a galley behind him — the very leap ashore that made him the first Greek to die at Troy. The civic mint thus claimed the Phylacian hero as its emblem: Demeter's veiled head on the obverse, the first casualty of the Trojan War on the reverse. The type is among the clearest ancient portraits of Protesilaus in action.
Coinage of Skione (Founded by Protesilaus)
Unknown (Skionian mint), c. 480–470 BC
Archaic silver of Skione on the Pallene peninsula, a city that traced its foundation to Protesilaus of Phylace. The early fifth-century issues keep the hero's cult and name in the monetary life of Chalcidice decades before Macedonia absorbed the region, a civic claim that the first Greek to fall at Troy was also a colonial founder. Now catalogued among the principal numismatic witnesses to Protesilaus.
Laodamia Writing (from Ovid's Heroides)
Robinet Testard, c. 1496–1498
A miniature from Octavien de Saint-Gelais's French translation of Ovid's Heroides (BnF Français 875) shows Laodamia at her desk composing the letter to her husband Protesilaus — the first of the Greeks to die at Troy, briefly returned from the underworld by Hermes so that the newly wed wife might see him once more. Testard's courtly interior makes the grief of Phylace legible: the hero himself is absent, yet every line of the epistle is addressed to him. It is one of the finest late-medieval images of the Protesilaus–Laodamia romance.