Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse

Introduction : The legend of the Trojan Horse

In Greek legend , Trojan Horse is a huge , hollow wooden horse constructed by the Greeks to gain entrance into Troy during the Trojan War . The horse was built by a master carpenter name Epeius . The Greeks pretending to desert the war , sailed to the nearby island of Tenedos leaving behind Sinon , who persuaded the Trojans that the horse was an offering to Athena that would make Troy impregnable . Despite the warnings of Laocoon and Cassandra , the horse was taken inside . That

night warriors emerged from it and opened the city 's gates to the returned Greek army . The episode of the Trojan is described in Aeneid and is touched upon in the Odyssey . The term Trojan Horse has come to refer to subversion introduced from the outside

The context of the Trojan War

The legendary Trojan War was fought between the early Greeks and the people of Troy (now in Turkey . The scene of this great battle was the city of Troy in about 1230 BC . The war lasted for 10 years . According to the legend , the war started in about 1240 BC - when Paris , the prince of Troy , fell in love with Helen , the beautiful wife of King Menelaus of Sparta , and carried her off to Troy with him . Menelaus ' brother , the great king Agamemnon of Argos , summoned all the kings of the other Greek cities , and set off with a thousand ships to bring Helen back . For a number of years the Greeks besieged Troy without success . Then they devised an ingenious scheme to defeat the enemy

The sources : the Greek and Roman epics

One of the main sources of our information on the Trojan War is Homer 's Iliad , which however covers only a ten-day interlude of the war , not dealing with the Trojan Horse incident . The Iliad dates to the ninth or eight century BC , whereas the Trojan War allegedly occurred in thirteenth century BC . Therefore , there is already a gap of several hundred years between the actual event and the first recorded narrative of it . The Trojan horse episode is alluded to in Homer 's other great epic , the Odyssey , describing the adventures of Odysseus The famous standard version of the story of the Trojan Horse actually comes from a much later work , the Roman poet Virgil 's Aeneid . It is dealt with at length in Book II . The Trojan Horse is labeled monstrum in Aeneid 2 .245 (Papaioannou 183 . Virgil wrote the Aeneid in the first century BC , and it tells the story of Aenaeas , a participant in the war who fled Troy and later became one of the founders of Rome . A lesser-known epic of the Ancient Greece and a part of the Cyclic Epic ' series , Little Iliad , composed around seventh century BC supplied an elaborate version of the story while filling in many of the details , which may be at variance from the other accounts . The events of Trojan War , often with references to the Trojan Horse , also appear in various other Greek epics (especially the other Cyclic Epics ) and latter-day Latin works . It must be noted that the Homeric epics as well as the poems of the epic cycle are based on hundreds of years of oral tradition which allows a large scope for distortion of the original historical events , if indeed the Trojan War is part of real history Virgil 's of the sacking of Troy is itself supposed to based on the original material from the cyclic epic Iliou Persis

The Trojan Horse narrative

But come now , shift your ground . Sing of the wooden horse Epeus built with Athena 's help , the cunning trap that good Odysseus brought one day to the heights of Troy , filling with fighting men who laid the city waste . - The Odyssey : 8 .550 (Fagles 207

Odysseus prayed to the goddess Athena and she instructed him to have the skillful Epeius build an enormous wooden horse , as big as a hill , with room inside to hold two dozen soldiers . The goddess instructed Odysseus to hide himself and a few other Greek heroes within it , while the rest of the Greeks burn their camp and sail away . She confidently predicted that the Trojans would bring the horse within their fort and this "gift would bring their downfall

Epeius , the master ship-builder , understood the plan and on the shore constructed the horse out of sturdy lumber . The Greeks set fire to their camp , and embarked their ships . Across the ocean lay a little island once prosperous but during the long war abandoned and deserted . There the Greeks beached their ship out of sight on the seaward side , while they sent men to its highest point to watch for the signal light hat should summon them secretly back to Troy

Meanwhile , Odysseus , Menelaus and other Greek heroes climbed up a rope ladder into wooden horse and Epeius himself went up last and closed the trap door . The Trojans were joyous to see the Greek ships sail away into the Aegean Sea . The gates of the city were flung open , and the populace of Troy ran shouting over the sandy plain to explore the deserted camp It was the first carefree day that many boys had experienced in their entire lives , as some of them frolicked their way to the banks of Skamander , where Achilles had once hurled Lykaon into the stream . Most people however flocked to the curious giant wooden horse the Greeks had left by the water . This object troubled many Trojan leaders , including King Priam . They came down to the sea to inspect it . The words carved into its side impressed them "The Greeks on their journey home honor Athena with this gift of thanks " Some elderly Trojans immediately suspected some kind of ruse or evil stratagem , and immediately cried out to sink the horse in the sea

Laocoon , the priest of Poseidon , vehemently demanded to have it burned without delay . He rightly imagined armed men inside it and hurled his spear at the creature 's side . The muted echo from it seemed to confirm his doubts . However , the majority of the people there believed the great horse to be a sacred image and even suggested building an altar near it These people were outraged at Laocoon 's act of hurling a spear at the sacred image

The people were looking for King Priam 's directions , when a cry arose from the youths on the banks of Skamander , who found a man hiding in the brushes there . Overpowering him by sheer numbers , they bound his hands behind him and dragged him toward the group . While the crowd hysterically tried to attack this man , they were stopped by Priam . The king calmed the crowd and questioned the stranger . Priam found out from the man that his name was Sinon . Sinon narrated a long story of how he fell in disfavor of Odysseus and how they wanted him to be sacrificed to their gods . Yet Sinon managed to escape . As Priam and his people were happily celebrating victory , they chose to forgive Sinon . They however enquired from Sinon the meaning of this puzzling giant wooden horse

Sinon , in all sincerity , recounted how the gods bade them make a sacred image and how if the Trojans destroyed it , ruin would fall on them . If on the other the hand they placed it in the citadel , it would protect the citadel and make it impregnable . The Greeks , hoping that the Trojans would never be able to pull in a horse of such huge size and imagining they would burn it in all probability , thereby rousing the wrath of gods , left it there . Led on by the false tale of Sinon , the people hauled up the horse into their citadel . According to one version , they had to break a portion of the wall in to haul the horse in According to another version , the two dozen great warriors began to sack Troy themselves , aided by secrecy , and thereafter opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army to come in . At midnight , the Greeks poured through the streets , broke into the houses and slaughtered the Trojans wherever they found them , sparing of the male sex (Wood 25

Conclusion : the reality of the Trojan Horse

The bronze war-trumpet came from Tyrrenus ' son Pisaeus , the testudo from Artemon of Clazomenae , and , from Epius while at Troy , the style of siege-engine called the "horse " now the "ram

- Pliny , Natural History 7 .200-2 (Humphrey et al , 542

Tricks are hoaxes can be powerful military tactics . According to legend the most famous trick in military history occurred in ancient Greece . It was of course the Trojan Horse . The war was ten years old when that most cunning warrior , Odysseus , came up with a trick to defeat the Trojans and end the war . A protracted military siege had failed to break through the defenses of Troy . However , a few days ' work on a wooden horse which concealed a mere handful of its enemies brought about the city 's downfall

The attacking Greeks did not limit their tactic of deceit to the concealing of some of their best warriors in the sides of the wooden horse . An equally shrewd piece of trickery was their use of a fake refugee . Having build the horse , the Greeks pretended to withdraw from the siege of Troy , but they left behind them one o their own soldiers Sinon , who succeeded in befooling the Trojans . Sinon 's role was crucial in the success of the ploy

In reality , however , there could be no Sinon . The Trojan Horse could in fact be referring to a massive weapon of war instead of a clever ploy Only a few scholars appear to accept the tradition of the wooden horse as history . Much more commonly , scholars interpret the tradition as distorted history . The wooden horse is generally considered to be a device to break down the walls of Troy . Pliny , the Roman historian , in his list of the inventors of different weapons of war , credits Epeios with the invention of the horse , which is now ' called the ram ' by which Pliny means the battering ram . Pliny 's is one of the more plausible ancient explanations of the famous Trojan Horse

Besides Pliny , Pausanias and Servius too strongly suggest that the wooden horse in reality was an engine of war , probably an oriental siege-engine . Most evidence seems to point at the conclusion that the wooden horse is a mythologized battering ram that entered the Trojan legend centuries after the fall of Troy

References

Fagles , Robert . The Odyssey by Homer ' New York : Penguin Putnam 1996

Humphrey , John William Oleson , John Peter Sherwood , Andrew N . Greek and Roman Technology a Sourcebook : Annotated Translations of Greek and Latin Texts ' London : Routledge , 2003

Papaioannou , Sophia . Epic Succession And Dissension : Ovid Metamorphoses 13 .623-14 .582 , and the Reinvention of the Aeneid ' Berlin : Walter de Gruyter GmbH Co

Wood , Michael . In Search of the Trojan War . Berkeley : University of California Press , 1996

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