Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Telamon.
The gallery
The Marriage of Telamon and Hesione (Trojan frieze, House of Octavius Quartio)
Unknown (Pompeian wall-painter), 1st century AD (before AD 79)
This fresco survives on the wall of the triclinium in the House of Octavius Quartio at Pompeii, part of a continuous painted frieze that narrates the legend of Troy. The scene shows Telamon, the Salaminian companion of Heracles who was first through the walls in the first sack of the city, together with Hesione, the Trojan princess he won as his prize of war and by whom he fathered Teucer. The episode is read as the marriage of Telamon and Hesione, or as Hesione's farewell to her brother Priam, with Heracles and Telamon standing in attendance at the right. Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, the painting is a rare surviving ancient depiction of Telamon by name, fixing him within the Trojan cycle that his sons Ajax and Teucer would carry into Homer's war.