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The Death of Sarpedon
The divine guide to letting go
Tyler Barstow
February 13, 2023 • Est. Reading Time: 5 minutes
Professor James Arieti, longtime head of the Classics Department and my college advisor, had a ritual on the first day of the semester for his freshman classes that became the stuff of (minor) legend. He would draw a circle on the chalkboard and turn to the class and say “This is what God knows.” He’d then draw a larger circle around it before turning around again and noting “And this is what I know.” The frat lords and aspiring Winklevae in my class agreed afterwards that he was the most arrogant guy they’d ever met, and I had decided I was taking every single class he offered. This is probably the only good decision I made before the age of 24.
One of Arieti’s fundamental gifts was (and is) his ability to force young minds into the profound, similar maybe to an educated mother’s imperative to herd her children into little suits and dresses and van or station wagon them to the opera. I’ll probably never forget his discussion of the death of Sarpedon in The Iliad, and in the years since that class session I’ve slowly started to believe that a great deal of life is contained in that scene.
Sleep and Death carry the body of Sarpedon to Lycia - Johann Heinrich Füssli
As a quick summary, Sarpedon was one of Zeus’ favorite sons and one of the champions fighting for the side of Troy in the Trojan War. In the scene, he is about to be killed by Patroclus, companion and friend to Achilles in every possible meaning of those two ancient words. Zeus wants to intervene and have him carried back to his homeland to live out a long and prosperous. Hera, Zeus’ wife, cautions him that not letting Sarpedon die will cause incredible chaos. I’ve included her message to him below from the text in case you’d like to read it for yourself.
In turn the lady Hera of the ox eyes answered [Zeus]:
‘Majesty, son of Kronos, what sort of thing have you spoken?
Do you wish to bring back a man who is mortal, one long since
Doomed by his destiny, from ill-sounding death and release him?
Do it, then; but not all the rest of us gods shall approve you.
And put away in your thoughts this other thing I tell you;
If you bring Sarpedon back to his home, still living,
Think how then some other one of the gods might also
Wish to carry his own son out of the strong encounter;
Since around the great city of Priam are fighting many
Sons of the immortals. You will waken grim resentment among them.
No, but if he is dear to you, and your heart mourns for him,
Then let him be, and let him go down in the strong encounter
Underneath the hands of Patroklos, the son of Menoitios;
But after the soul and the years of his life have left him, then send
Death to carry him away, and Sleep, who is painless,
Until they come with him to the countryside of broad Lykia
Where his brothers and countrymen shall give him due burial
with tomb and gravestone. Such is the privilege of those who have perished.
The Iliad, Book 16, lines 439 to 457
I was thinking about this moment again yesterday while I was grocery shopping, and about how it seems to be true that the way we let go of anything is the way we let go of everything. For my part, I fall squarely in the camp of this excerpt from Infinite Jest:
“Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
I don’t feel particularly bothered by that, living is a difficult business and I get why I think It All Means So Much even though it doesn’t. But the fact remains that I have had, and continue to have, a complicated relationship with Time. Regardless of scope, it is always heartbreaking when something comes to an end and I’m learning to accept that for me, letting something go means letting all four stomachs of my emotional system have their time in the digestive sun, so to speak. As it turns out Feeling, rather than Intervention, is the only way to move forward.