Laodamia
Wife of Protesilaus who embraced a wax image of her dead husband so desperately the gods briefly returned him to life.
The Legend of Laodamia
The gods gave her three hours with her dead husband — then she killed herself when they took him back. Protesilaus was the first Greek to die at Troy, fulfilling a prophecy. Laodamia's grief was so extreme that Hermes persuaded Hades to release Protesilaus's shade for three hours. When the time expired and he vanished, she stabbed herself. An alternate version says she made a wax effigy of Protesilaus and slept beside it; her father Acastus found it and burned the statue, and Laodamia threw herself into the fire. Euripides wrote a lost play about her. The myth directly influenced the story of Orpheus and Eurydice — both are tales of love challenging death's permanence.
Parents
Acastus
Symbols
Fun Fact
Wordsworth's poem Laodamia (1815) retells this story as a meditation on whether love justifies defying divine law.
Explore Further
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🗡 herodevotion
Wife of Capaneus who threw herself onto his funeral pyre at Thebes, becoming the archetype of self-immolating devotion.
Alcestis
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Ariadne
🗡 herolove
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Anticlea
🗡 heroNone recorded
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Anticleia
🗡 heroNone recorded
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Phaedra
🗡 heroQueen consumed by forbidden love
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Polyxena
🗡 herosacrifice
Trojan princess sacrificed on Achilles's tomb after the fall of Troy to appease his ghost.
Deianeira
🗡 herolove, destruction
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Alcmene
🗡 heroMother of Heracles
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Megara
🗡 heroNone recorded
First wife of Heracles, given to him as a reward and later killed in his madness