One final question. It can be briefly addressed – and is arguably irrelevant to all that has gone before. This hero Sarpedon – did he really exist?
No one can give absolute dates for his existence. That was as true in antiquity as it is now. For the Greeks, year-by-year chronology began with the inaugural athletic games at Olympia. Subsequently, this ‘First Olympiad’ was reckoned as 776 BC. What happened before 776 was only vaguely put into sequence. The stuff of history became interwoven with cosmology and myth; and such myths as may have developed out of ‘real events’ were rarely scrutinized for their historical credibility. As noted (p. 123), there was throughout the classical world widespread credence in an ‘age of heroes’. Whether epic poetry about Troy was a cause or a result of hero-cult remains debatable: either way, the poetry about heroes was not categorized as ‘fantasy’. There had been a great conflict at Troy. Never mind exactly when it took place: individuals claiming to be descendants of its protagonists were around to uphold the family honour.
Homer did not explain why a Lycian prince called Sarpedon joined the Trojan side. Xanthos lies some 430 miles (about 700 km) south of Troy. Some rationalizing explanation could be attempted for a Lycian–Trojan alliance in the Late Bronze Age. But it is not necessary. As Homer reported, the Greek force was drawn from places far beyond the Peloponnese; so Priam, like Agamemnon, could plausibly count upon distant allies. For Homer, this pro-Trojan Sarpedon was fathered by Zeus with Laodameia, a daughter of Bellerophon (whose despatch of the Chimaera was located in Lycia). Evidently, however, there was another tradition, which told how the liaison between Zeus and Europa produced three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon. The island of Crete could not contain the trio. Sarpedon headed eastwards. Rhadamanthus, famed for his judgement, did not die, but went to exercise his wisdom in the Underworld. Minos then ruled Crete: and since his reign was considered to have happened several generations before the Trojan war, post-Homeric commentators came up with various ways of reconciling the disjointed chronology associated with the name ‘Sarpedon’. The reasoned explanation was that the Europa-born Sarpedon was grandfather to the Laodameia-born Sarpedon (Diod. Sic. 5.79.3).
Sarpedon senior was credited with the foundation of Miletus in Caria (Strabo 14.1.6). Above all however he was inseparable from the historical definition of Lycia (Hdt. 1.73). Philologists have surmised that a name in ancient Lycian (related to other Anatolian languages, such as Hittite, but eventually written using a version of the Greek alphabet) could be an indigenous form of ‘Sarpedon’: Zrppudeine. One thing, however, became certain (and it may already have been known to Homer and his audience): that Sarpedon was worshipped as a hero at Xanthos, the capital of Lycia.
Fig. 75 View of Xanthos, western Turkey. Tombs of heroized ancestors are still prominent amid the remains of the (later) urban structures. The city was abandoned in the tenth century AD, after a succession of Arab raids. Systematic excavations began in the 1950s.
Fig. 76 Part of the marble frieze (north side) of the ‘Harpy Tomb’ from Xanthos, c.480–470 BC. The tomb takes its name from the hybrid human–bird figures (more like sirens) carrying bodies (to the next life?). This slab appears also to show a dedicant offering a helmet-trophy to a seated ancestor (Replicas of these reliefs evident in situ on the right-hand tomb in Fig.. 75). H 1.02 metres (3’ 4”). London, British Museum 1848.1020.1.
Xanthos is a pleasant inland diversion from the holiday resorts of Kas and Kalkan (Fig. 75). The view over the Esen (Xanthos) River and its fertile valley calls to mind Sarpedon’s fond evocation of his kingdom, as described by Homer (see p. 112). It is not so easy to imagine the catastrophes historically documented for the site. The first came in 540 BC, when the city was besieged by the Persians. Resistance ended with a holocaust of all those who sought sanctuary on the acropolis. Then there was major fire damage, during Greek campaigns against the Persians c.470 BC. Collective memory of these traumas had not yet faded when, in c.42 BC, Xanthos was attacked by Roman forces under Brutus, who was raising funds and recruits for his fight against Octavian and Mark Antony. A mass suicide of inhabitants ensued. Relating the course of events, the historian Appian adds a detail important to us: that a detachment of Roman soldiers, finding themselves trapped and outnumbered in the agora of Xanthos, sought refuge in the precincts of the place where Sarpedon was venerated – the Sarpedoneion (BC. 4.78–9).
Lycia generally presents a landscape of conspicuous funerary commemoration. A striking feature of Xanthos is the presence of spectacular burials within the city (most spectacular of all the ‘Nereid Monument’, reconstructed in the British Museum). These are interpreted as dynastic memorials – monuments where prayers and offerings were brought to powerful ancestor-heroes. Sculpted reliefs of the ‘Harpy Tomb’ seem to show scenes of such worship (Fig. 76). This is the cultural context of a heroôn or hero-chapel dedicated to Sarpedon – with the implication that his bodily remains were preserved there.
Several ancient sources attest the existence of a Sarpedon cult in Lycia. But where exactly was it? Appian’s narrative implies that the Sarpedoneion in Xanthos was not far from the agora/forum, which is situated on the lower slopes of the so-called ‘Lycian acropolis’ of the city. There are tombs in this area, but presumably the Roman soldiers retreated up the hill, to a point on the acropolis where they were not entirely surrounded, i.e. upon its cliff edge. Henri Metzger, the archaeologist who excavated this area, located a rectangular structure at such a point – and suggested that it had functioned as a heroôn, c.460 BC. To judge by a number of associated architectural and sculptural fragments (some in the British Museum), the structure consisted of a tomb upon a raised dais (Fig. 77). Metzger labelled it simply ‘Edifice G’. Subsequent scholars have been less wary – and claimed it as the site of the Sarpedoneion.
Fig. 77 Reconstruction of the terrace on the top of the Lycian acropolis, Xanthos, as it was in the mid-fifth century BC. The base of ‘Edifice G’ (centre) measures 15.50 × 10.25 metres (50’ 10” × 33’ 8”).
There are foundations of Byzantine houses in the vicinity, and the remains of a temple (probably to Artemis). Visitors may notice these; frankly there is not much to see of ‘Edifice G’ – and nothing has come from it that would firmly establish the connection with Sarpedon. In all likelihood, the fifth-century structure replaced an older monument. For the time being, we can only accept the basic ancient tradition about Sarpedon: that he died at Troy, but was brought home to Xanthos for burial (Ps. Aristotle Fr. 481.58 R3).
The cult of Sarpedon, in some fashion, probably continued at Xanthos until the fourth century AD; and probably ceased not long after Constantine’s Edict of Milan in AD 313, legitimizing Christianity throughout the Roman empire. A bishopric was established at Xanthos. Churches were built – including one upon the ‘Lycian acropolis’, near to ‘Edifice G’; and one of the Lycian dynastic tombs became home to a Stylite monk.
The veneration of Sarpedon as Lycia’s hero at Troy will have been curtailed as ‘pagan’ observance. Yet his image, as we have seen, eventually served as an emblem of supreme self-sacrifice in Christian iconography. Sarpedon the epic hero declared his reason for existence as a quest for ‘imperishable glory’ (kleos aphthiton). He did what he could to achieve this on the battlefield. Homer and the dramatists ensured transmission of those deeds to posterity. The rest was due to Euphronios – who when he painted ‘the Sarpedon krater’ created an image of traumatic glory that would far exceed its original limits of purpose, time and place.
Fig. 78 Detail of the Sarpedon krater. Cerveteri, Museo Archeologico.
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