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.
Telamon in the Amazonomachy (Tyrrhenian amphora by the Prometheus Painter)
Prometheus Painter, c. 550 BC
Attic black-figure Tyrrhenian amphora in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens (inv. 27524): beside Heracles, Telamon fights the Amazon Ainipe — the Salaminian hero named among the companions who sacked Troy in the generation before Homer's war.
Peleus and Telamon, Argonauts Guided by Thetis
Balthasar Moncornet, after Remigio Cantagallina, c. 17th century
Baroque etching of the Argonaut pageant: Peleus and Telamon ride the festive ship guided by Thetis — Telamon remembered as Jason's companion and father of Ajax long before the walls of Troy.
Telamon and Aeacus
Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, late 18th century
Moreau le Jeune's neoclassical plate pairs Telamon with his brother Aeacus — the Aeacid line that will give the Greeks Ajax and Achilles, drawn as companion princes of the generation before the Trojan War.