Trikke (Τρίκκη) — a Homeric kingdom of the Odyssey, c. 1200 BC

Trikke — Trikke of the healing hands — house of Asklepios, whose two leech-sons went to Troy and only one came home.

The Thessalian realm of the Asklepiadai, physician-princes who led thirty ships to Troy as the surgeons of the whole Achaean host. Machaon fell to Eurypylus before the walls; Podaleirios lived through the sack but was driven off course on the return, leaving the healer-line of Trikke broken.

Leader at Troy: Podaleirios.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Podaleirios.

Role in the Trojan War: Achaean. Thirty ships under the brothers Machaon and Podaleirios, sons of Asklepios — the battlefield leeches of the Greek host, who cut arrows from the wounded and dressed their hurts with the drugs Cheiron once gave their sire.

The homecoming: One son slain at Troy, one lost to Caria — the healer-line of Asklepios broken.

In the upper Thessalian country, where the Peneios gathers from the hills, lay Trikke, seat of the Asklepiadai — the sons of Asklepios, whom Apollo begot and the centaur Cheiron taught the gentle craft of the leech. With terraced Ithome and Oichalia, the city of Eurytos, it sent thirty hollow ships to Troy, and their leaders were no common spearmen but the 'cunning leeches Podaleirios and Machaon,' healers to the whole assembled host.\n\nAmong the Achaeans the worth of Trikke was measured not in slaughter but in lives kept. When a Trojan bow-shot pierced Menelaos of LAC beside the truce-altars, it was Machaon whom Agamemnon of MYC summoned by his herald from the ranks he led out of horse-pasturing Trikke; the healer drew the barbed arrow from the clasped belt, sucked the wound, and 'cunningly spread thereon soothing drugs, such as Cheiron of his good will had imparted to his sire.' So the house of Asklepios served the kings of Greece, and the whole camp knew a saying that a leech was worth many other men.\n\nYet the healer was not spared the spear. In the great day of Hector's fury, Alexandros — Paris of TRO — smote Machaon in the right shoulder with a three-barbed arrow, and terror ran through the Achaeans lest they lose him; knightly Nestor of PYL caught him up into his chariot and drove him from the press, for 'a leech is worth many other men.' Machaon lived on to fight again — until Eurypylus, the son of Telephus who led the Mysian host of MYS to Troy's late rescue, ran him through the breast over the body of Nireus. He fell 'as falls beneath a lion's jaws a bull,' and dying he foretold his slayer's own swift doom on the plain. His bones the men of Pylos bore, and Nestor carried them home; the Little Iliad and the Messenians keep his tomb and honour him as a hero who gives cures.\n\nOf the two Asklepiad brothers, then, only Podaleirios came through the war. He was among the picked men who crouched in the wooden horse when Troy fell, and it was he who tended the festering hurt of the great archer Philoctetes and closed the wounds of the host to the end. But the return granted him no homecoming to Trikke: driven from his course after the sack, he was carried to Syrnos on the Carian mainland — the land of the CAR — and settled there, far from Thessaly. So at the tenth year of the returns the healer-line stands broken: Machaon buried in Messenian earth, Podaleirios a wanderer turned founder in Caria, and Trikke, the cradle of the physician's art, left without its Asklepiad lords.

“For a leech is worth many other men, to cut out arrows, and spread soothing medicaments.” — Iliad 11.514-515