Characters
- Aeacus — mortal helper in Pindaric enrichment (optional)
- Artemis — co-laborer (herds on Ida in Poseidon’s speech); also unpaid
- Laomedon — Trojan king; hires then defrauds the gods
- Poseidon — co-builder of Troy’s wall; cheated of wages; lasting enemy of Troy
- Trojans — beneficiaries and later victims of the fraud’s aftermath
Places
- Sea and plain of Troy — later theatres of Poseidon’s wrath (cross-ref Hesione)
- Troy — walls built by the gods
Themes
Narrative
Homer twice recalls that Poseidon and Apollo served Laomedon for a fixed time and built the walls of Troy. In *Iliad* 21 Poseidon reproaches Apollo for forgetting that labor: the two gods toiled for the mortal king; Poseidon built the wall about the city, Apollo herded cattle on the ridges of Ida; when their term ended Laomedon withheld the agreed wage and drove them off with threats. From that fraud spring Poseidon’s lasting anger at Troy and his eagerness to see the city fall, while Apollo remains a Trojan partisan for other reasons (Hector, Chryses, the city’s cult).
Apollodorus and later mythographers weld the unpaid wage to pestilence, a sea-monster, and Hesione’s exposure—narratives catalogued under Heracles. This entry keeps the Homeric core: two Olympians in temporary mortal service, a wall that should have made Troy secure, and a king’s perjury that seeds divine enmity. Pindar’s notice that Aeacus helped so the wall would not be wholly impregnable is an optional enrichment, not required for the Homeric quarrel.