Trojan horse
What is the story of the Trojan horse?
Why is it called a Trojan horse?
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Trojan horse, in Greek mythology, a huge hollow wooden horse constructed by the Greeks to gain entrance into Troy during the Trojan War. It is one of the famous subterfuges in epic literature, told briefly in Homer’s Odyssey and at length in Virgil’s Aeneid. The term “Trojan horse” has come to refer to subversion introduced from the outside. Beginning in the late 20th century, it was applied to deceptively benign computer codes that seem like legitimate applications but are written to damage or disrupt a computer’s programming or to steal personal information.
The plan and construction
The wooden horse was devised in the tenth year of the war, necessitated by the failure of the Greeks to breach the walls of Troy. The seers Calchas and Helenus had stipulated that Troy would fall if the Palladium (a statue of Athena) was removed from the city, Heracles’ bow and arrows were brought to the Greek camp, and Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, was recruited into the fighting. The battle-fatigued Greeks fulfilled these conditions and opted to employ deception to end the war.
The stratagem of the horse was conceived by Odysseus, on whose craftiness the Greeks had relied heavily during the war. The horse was built by Epeius, a master carpenter and pugilist, and the soldiers hidden within included Odysseus, Menelaus (husband of Helen, whose elopement with Paris caused the war), Diomedes, Ajax the Lesser, and Neoptolemus. 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.
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Trojan priest Laocoön warned his fellow citizens against trusting the Greeks. In the Aeneid Laocoön says: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” translated as “I fear the Danaans (Greeks), even those bearing gifts.” Had he been heeded, the war might well have continued, interfering with the divine plan. And so he was punished: Giant serpents rose out of the sea and killed Laocoön and his twin sons.
Inside the city
Despite the warnings of Laocoön and Cassandra, the horse was taken inside the city gates. The Odyssey relates that Helen identified the horse as an ambush and attempted to expose it as such by imitating the voices of the wives of the concealed warriors. Her ploy failed because of Odysseus, who prevented the soldiers inside the horse from revealing themselves. That night the Greek warriors emerged from their hiding place and opened the gates to let in the returned Greek army. Few Trojans survived the devastation that followed; the male members of the royal family were murdered, among them King Priam, while the women were distributed among the Greeks as spoils of war. The hero Aeneas, whose story is told in the Aeneid, escaped the sack of Troy and founded Lavinium (the parent town of Rome and Alba Longa).
Is the Trojan horse a real story?
While historians generally agree that the Trojan War is based on a real conflict or a series of conflicts, they reject the idea that the wooden horse was anything but Homeric invention. While some experts believe that the horse could refer to a physical object—a siege engine or battering ram—others theorize that Homer used it as a literary device to represent the subjugation of the Trojans, who were closely associated with horses. It has also been suggested that Troy was destroyed by an earthquake, symbolized by the wooden horse—Poseidon, the god of both horses and earthquakes, is depicted as having favored the Greek side in the war.
