Sarpedon

Also Known As: Greek: Σαρπηδών
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A demigod son of Zeus whose divine blood gave him the strength to fight in the front rank of the fiercest battle in the myths, though it could not spare him a mortal’s death.
Role in Mythos: King of Lycia and commander of Troy’s most important foreign allies, he was killed by Patroclus in the Iliad and mourned by his own father.
Relation to Humans: He ruled the Lycians as their king and led them to war across the sea, claiming the honors of a lord and paying for them with his life in the front line. For all his descent from Zeus, he died like any of the men who followed him, and knew that he would.

The Achaean wall had held all morning, and then a Lycian put his hands on it. Sarpedon gripped the top of the rampart and pulled, and a whole section of the battlement came away in his arms, stones and timber together, the way a man strips thatch from a roof. Below him the ditch was churned mud, and the air stank of dust and sweat and split earth. He did not shout. He simply made the gap, and the road into the Greek camp lay open behind it.

Moments before, he had turned to Glaucus, his cousin and co-commander, and asked the question that has outlived almost everything else about him. Why, he wondered, do the Lycians seat the two of them at the best places, fill their cups first, give them the choicest cuts and the richest land along the Xanthus? Because men look to them to stand at the front where the fighting is hottest, so that some heavy-armored Lycian might say their kings do not eat their honor unearned. If they could escape this war and live forever, ageless and undying, he would not fight in the front himself, nor send Glaucus there. But death stands over every man in ten thousand shapes, and no one alive slips past it. So they might as well go on and give glory to another man or take it themselves. It is the clearest statement in the whole poem of why any of them are on that plain at all.

His parentage is a knot the ancients never fully untied. Homer makes him the son of Zeus and Laodamia, a daughter of the hero Bellerophon, which roots him firmly in Lycia. Later writers made him instead the son of Zeus and Europa, the Phoenician princess the god carried off to Crete, and so the brother of Minos and Rhadamanthys. In that version the brothers fell out, over a beautiful boy in some tellings and over power in others, and Minos drove Sarpedon into exile; he sailed east with his followers and became king in Lycia. Diodorus tried to reconcile the two accounts by stretching a single bloodline across three generations, giving the Cretan Sarpedon a grandson of the same name who lived long enough to reach Troy. Herodotus treated the migration as history and traced the Lycians themselves back to that Cretan exile. The stories do not agree, and they never will.

Homer, who lingers lovingly over the armor of far lesser men, gives Sarpedon almost no portrait beyond the essentials: bronze cuirass, broad shield, two spears, and a way of moving at the head of his people that made lesser fighters give ground. What the poem insists on is not how he looked but the effect he had on the men around him, which in the Iliad comes to nearly the same thing. He is known by his shadow falling across the wall and by the space that opens when he moves.

Earlier in the war he had met Tlepolemus, a son of Heracles leading the men of Rhodes, and the two traded taunts about their divine blood before they threw. Tlepolemus’s spear missed. Sarpedon’s went through the other man’s neck. But Sarpedon took a spearhead in the thigh in the same instant, and his companions had to haul him out of the press with the shaft still in the wound, because in the rush no one thought to draw it. He lived, and healed, and came back to the wall.

His last fight was with Patroclus, who had come onto the field in Achilles’s armor with the Trojans breaking before him. Watching from Olympus, Zeus knew his son was about to die, and he weighed lifting him clear of the battle and setting him down alive in Lycia. Hera stopped him with a cold and unanswerable point. If he saved his own child from fate, every god with a mortal son at Troy would demand the same, and the whole order of things would come apart. Zeus let him go. But he grieved, and in place of thunder he sent down a rain of blood over the plain, a father’s sorrow paid in the only currency a sky god keeps. The two closed; Sarpedon’s cast killed one of Patroclus’s horses, but the answering throw took him low in the belly. He fell like an oak going down, and with his last breath called on Glaucus to fight for his body and keep the Greeks from stripping his armor.

They stripped it anyway, after a long grinding struggle over the corpse in which the dust rose so thick that no one could have known Sarpedon by sight, so caked was he in blood and filth from head to foot. Then Zeus took the one thing left to him. He sent Apollo down to carry the body out of spear-range, wash the gore from it in running water, anoint it with ambrosia and wrap it in immortal cloth. And he gave it to two silent brothers, Sleep and Death, twins who bear the dead without cruelty, and they carried Sarpedon home through the air to the broad land of Lycia, where his people raised a mound and a pillar over him.

His strength was the plain inheritance of his blood. The son of Zeus could tear open a wall that other men only battered, and hold the front rank of the most dangerous war in the myths without being swept under. What his blood could not buy was the one thing that mattered. He was mortal, bound by the same fate as the Lycian farmers behind him, and he knew it, and said so aloud before ever the wall came down. The most powerful of the gods was his father and could not save him, because saving him would have cost more than a son was worth. That is the whole of Sarpedon: a man who understood exactly what honor was worth, paid the full price for it in front of everyone, and was borne off the field by Sleep and Death while the god who fathered him looked on and could do nothing but weep.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Sarpedon in Greek mythology?

Sarpedon was a demigod son of Zeus and the king of Lycia, who led the Lycians to Troy as the most prominent of the Trojans’ foreign allies. In Homer’s Iliad he is a leading warrior on the Trojan side, famous for a speech to his cousin Glaucus about why noble men must fight in the front rank, and for his death at the hands of Patroclus.

How did Sarpedon die?

Sarpedon was killed by Patroclus during the fighting in Book 16 of the Iliad, struck by a spear low in the belly after his own cast had killed one of Patroclus’s horses. Zeus knew his son was fated to die and chose not to intervene, and a fierce battle then broke out over Sarpedon’s body and armor.

Who were Sarpedon’s parents?

The sources disagree. Homer names his parents as Zeus and Laodamia, a daughter of Bellerophon, while later writers such as Apollodorus make him the son of Zeus and Europa and a brother of Minos and Rhadamanthys. Diodorus Siculus reconciled the two traditions by making the Trojan-War Sarpedon a grandson of the earlier Cretan one.

Why did Zeus rain blood over the battlefield for Sarpedon?

Zeus wept a rain of blood over the plain of Troy to honor his son Sarpedon, whom he had decided not to rescue from his fated death. Hera had warned him that saving one divine child would prompt every other god to demand the same for their own mortal sons, so Zeus let Sarpedon die and marked his grief with the bloody rain instead.

What happened to Sarpedon’s body after he died?

After the Greeks stripped his armor, Zeus sent Apollo to lift Sarpedon’s body from the battlefield, wash away the blood, anoint it with ambrosia and wrap it in immortal cloth. Apollo then handed the body to the twin brothers Sleep (Hypnos) and Death (Thanatos), who carried it home to Lycia for burial beneath a mound and a pillar.