The Trojan Horse is a tale from the Trojan War about the stratagem that allowed the Greeks finally to enter the city of Troy and end the conflict. In the canonical version, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse, and hid a select force of men inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, decisively ending the war.
The main ancient source for the story is the Aeneid of Virgil, a Latin epic poem from the time of Augustus. The event does not occur in Homer's Iliad, which ends before the fall of the city, but is referred to in the Odyssey. In the Greek tradition, the horse is called the "Wooden Horse" (Δούρειος Ἵππος, Doúreios Híppos, in the Homeric Ionic dialect).
Metaphorically a "Trojan Horse" has come to mean any trick or stratagem that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected bastion or space. It is also associated with "malware" computer programs presented as useful or harmless to induce the user to install and run them.
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According to Quintus Smyrnaeus, Odysseus came up with the idea of building a great wooden horse (the horse being the emblem of Troy), hiding a select force inside, and fooling the Trojans into wheeling the horse into the city as a trophy. Under the leadership of Epeios, the Greeks built the wooden horse in three days. Odysseus' plan called for one man to remain outside of the horse; he would act as though the Greeks abandoned him, leaving the horse as a gift for the Trojans. A Greek soldier named Sinon was the only volunteer for the role. Virgil describes the actual encounter between Sinon and the Trojans: Sinon successfully convinces the Trojans that he has been left behind and that the Greeks are gone. Sinon tells the Trojans that the Horse is an offering to the goddess Athena, meant to atone for the previous desecration of her temple at Troy by the Greeks, and ensure a safe journey home for the Greek fleet. The Horse was built on such a huge size to prevent the Trojans from taking the offering into their city, and thus garnering the favor of Athena for themselves.
While questioning Sinon, the Trojan priest Laocoön guesses the plot and warns the Trojans, in Virgil's famous line "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" (I fear Greeks even those bearing gifts).[1](original:Φοβού τους Δαναούς και δώρας φέρονταις) which became known as 'beware of Greeks bearing gifts," Danaos being the ones who built the Trojan Horse. However, the god Poseidon sent two sea serpents to strangle him and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus, before any Trojan believes his warning. According to Apollodorus it was Apollo who sent the two serpents since Laocoon had insulted Apollo by sleeping with his wife in front of the "divine image".[2] Helen of Troy also guesses the plot and tries to trick and uncover the Greek men inside the horse by imitating the voices of their wives. Anticlus would have answered, but Odysseus shut his mouth with his hand.[3] King Priam's daughter Cassandra, the soothsayer of Troy, insists that the horse would be the downfall of the city and its royal family. She too is ignored, hence their doom and loss of the war.[4]
This incident is mentioned in the Odyssey:
The most detailed and most familiar version is in Virgil's Aeneid, Book II [1] (trans. A. S. Kline).
After many years have slipped by, the leaders of the Greeks,
opposed by the Fates, and damaged by the war,
build a horse of mountainous size, through Pallas’s divine art,
and weave planks of fir over its ribs:
they pretend it’s a votive offering: this rumour spreads.
They secretly hide a picked body of men, chosen by lot,
there, in the dark body, filling the belly and the huge
cavernous insides with armed warriors.
[...]
Then Laocoön rushes down eagerly from the heights
of the citadel, to confront them all, a large crowd with him,
and shouts from far off: ‘O unhappy citizens, what madness?
Do you think the enemy’s sailed away? Or do you think
any Greek gift’s free of treachery? Is that Ulysses’s reputation?
Either there are Greeks in hiding, concealed by the wood,
or it’s been built as a machine to use against our walls,
or spy on our homes, or fall on the city from above,
or it hides some other trick: Trojans, don’t trust this horse.
Whatever it is, I’m afraid of Greeks even those bearing gifts.’
Book II includes Laocoön saying: "Equo ne credite, Teucri. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." ("Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks, even bringing gifts.") This is the origin of the modern adage "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts".
Well before Virgil, the story is also alluded to in Greek classical literature. In Euripides' play Trojan Women, written in 415 B.C., the god Poseidon proclaims, “For, from his home beneath Parnassus, Phocian Epeus, aided by the craft of Pallas, framed a horse to bear within its womb an armed host, and sent it within the battlements, fraught with death; whence in days to come men shall tell of 'the wooden horse,' with its hidden load of warriors.”[5]
Thirty soldiers hid in the Trojan horse's belly and two spies in its mouth. Other sources give different numbers: Apollodorus 50;[6] Tzetzes 23;[7] and Quintus Smyrnaeus gives the names of thirty, but says there were more.[8] In late tradition the number was standardized at 40. Their names follow:[9]
According to Homer, Troy stood overlooking the Hellespont – a channel of water that separates Asia Minor and Europe. In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann set out to find it.[10] Following Homer's description, he started to dig at Hisarlik in Turkey and uncovered the ruins of several cities, built one on top of the other. Several of the cities had been destroyed violently, but it was not clear which, if any, was Homer's Troy. In his enthousiasm for digging down into the lowest (and therefore oldest) layer of settlement (Troy of 2500 B.C.), Schliemann actually destroyed a large portion of the preceding layers, including the Troy of the Homeric Iliad.
Pausanias, who lived in the 2nd century AD, wrote in his book Description of Greece "That the work of Epeius was a contrivance to make a breach in the Trojan wall is known to everybody who does not attribute utter silliness to the Phrygians"[11] where, by Phrygians, he means the Trojans.
There has been modern speculation that the Trojan Horse may have been a battering ram resembling, to some extent, a horse, and that the description of the use of this device was then transformed into a myth by later oral historians who were not present at the battle and were unaware of that meaning of the name. Assyrians at the time used siege machines with animal names; it is possible that the Trojan Horse was such.[12]
It has also been suggested that the Trojan Horse actually represents an earthquake that occurred between the wars that could have weakened Troy's walls and left them open for attack.[13] The deity Poseidon had a triple function as a god of the sea, of horses, and of earthquakes. Structural damage on Troy VI – its location being the same as that represented in Homer's Iliad and the artifacts found there suggesting it was a place of great trade and power – shows signs that there was indeed an earthquake. Generally, though, Troy VIIa is believed to be Homer's Troy (see below).
Some authors have suggested that the gift was not a horse with warriors hiding inside, but a boat carrying a peace envoy,[14] and it has also been noted that the terms used to put men in the horse are those used when describing the embarkation of men on a ship.[15]
There are three known surviving classical depictions of the Trojan horse. The earliest is on a fibula brooch dated about 700 BC. The other two are on relief pithos vases from the adjoining Grecian islands Mykonos and Tinos, both usually dated between 675 and 650 BC, the one from Mykonos being known as the Mykonos Vase.[16][17] Historian Michael Wood, however, dates the Mykonos Vase to the 8th century BC, some 500 years after the supposed time of the war, but before the written accounts attributed by tradition to Homer. Wood concludes from that evidence that the story of the Trojan Horse was in existence prior to the writing of those accounts.[18]
Media related to Trojan horse at Wikimedia Commons
