Sarpedon was famously the king of Lycia, a land that stands at the margins of Homeric epic but at the center of a long and complex Anatolian history. Known to the Greeks as Λυκίη (Lykíē), Lycia appears in the Iliad as a coherent and ancient society, one whose heroes fight and die far from home. Yet the Lycia that Homer preserves in poetry would be transformed, destroyed, and rebuilt many times over in history, leaving behind a legacy shaped as much by loss as by endurance.