Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Teucer.
The gallery
Statue of an Archer from the West Pediment of the Temple of Aphaia (traditionally identified as Teucer)
Unknown (Late Archaic Greek sculptor, Aegina), ca. 505-500 BC
This Late Archaic marble figure from the west pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, now in the Glyptothek in Munich, shows a kneeling warrior drawing his bow, and is traditionally identified as Teucer, the foremost archer among the Greeks at Troy and half-brother of Ajax. The pediment depicted an earlier expedition against Troy, peopled by Aeginetan heroes, and the bowman captures the figure for which Teucer was renowned in the Iliad: crouched behind the cover of Ajax's great shield, loosing arrows into the Trojan ranks. The taut, balanced pose and the lingering 'Archaic smile' make it one of the finest surviving images of a Greek archer-hero in monumental sculpture.
Teucer
Sir William Hamo Thornycroft, 1881 (plaster); bronze cast 1882
Hamo Thornycroft's life-size bronze, a landmark of the British New Sculpture movement, portrays Teucer at the climax of his greatest feat in Homer's Iliad: the half-brother of Ajax, best of the Achaean archers, taking aim at Hector with his bow. The nude figure stands with the bow thrust out in an outstretched left hand, the body coiled in the instant of release. First shown as a full-scale plaster at the Royal Academy in 1881; this cast is the Tate's bronze of the Chantrey Bequest type.
Teucer with Seated Heracles (amethyst intaglio)
Unknown (Roman gem-engraver), c. 50–100 AD
Roman amethyst intaglio: Teucer stands before a seated Heracles — the archer-son of Telamon linked to the hero who first sacked Troy with his father, a gem-scale reminder of the Salaminian bowman's lineage.
Statue of Teucer (Pontevedra)
Unknown (modern civic monument after the medieval foundation legend), 20th century (monument tradition)
The bronze Teucer in Pontevedra's Praza da Peregrina — Galicia's legendary founder cast as Homer's archer, the half-brother of Ajax who wandered west after the fall of Troy and gave the city its mythic pedigree.
In play
Ajax
Sophocles
Sophocles' tragedy makes Teucer the half-brother who arrives too late to stop Ajax's suicide, then fights Menelaus and Agamemnon for the right to bury him — the Salaminian archer as the play's defender of honour.
Pontevedra
Galician tradition names Teucer (Teucro) the mythical founder of Pontevedra — the Iliad's archer cast as city-father, its people still poetically called teucrinos.
Salamis, Cyprus
After exile from Salamis Island for failing to bring Ajax's arms home, Teucer founds a new Salamis on Cyprus — the archer's nostos rewritten as colonial foundation myth.
Odes
Horace
Horace's Ode 1.7 puts Teucer's exile speech in Latin: nil desperandum, tomorrow we set out on the vast ocean — the banished bowman as Rome's emblem of hope after defeat.