1 Hour of Ancient History and Lore Explained

After 10 years of siege, the Greeks accept that the walls aren't coming down by force.

Odysseus, the designated schemer of the coalition, proposes a different kind of weapon.

The Greeks appear to give up, they burn their camp, board their ships, and sail away, leaving behind an enormous wooden horse.

They also leave a man named Sinon, who lets himself be captured and spins a story.

The horse is an offering to Athena, deliberately built too large to fit through Troy's gates, because if the Trojans ever brought it inside, the city would become untouchable.

A priest named Laukon smells the trap and hurls a spear into the horse's flank, and moments later two serpents rise out of the sea and crush him along with his sons.

The Trojans read that as a divine verdict, believing that this mysterious giant horse is truly what Sinon says it is, not realizing that this was a plan of Odysseus.

the favorite of Athena.

They breach their own wall to drag the horse in, celebrate through the evening, and wake to fire and bronze.

The hidden men have opened the gates, and the Greek fleet has slipped back from a nearby island under the cover of night.

From there, the Greeks sack Troy, destroying the entire city, leaving only a few survivors, such as Aeneas, to escape.

That polished, canonical telling where everything is orderly and the narrative makes sense doesn't actually come from Homer, though.

The version I've just recounted comes primarily from Virgil, a Roman poet composing the Aeneid around 19 BC for an audience under the Emperor Augustus.

If the war happened at all, it happened somewhere around 1180 BC, which means Virgil stood further from Troy than we stand from the height of the Viking Age.

The Trojan Horse story as we know it is effectively Roman historical fiction, assembled more than a thousand years after the fact.

But the idea of the Trojan Horse is much older, perhaps older than the legendary founding of Rome itself.

Homer, whoever he actually was, composed somewhere around the 8th century BC, roughly four centuries after the supposed war.

The Iliad covers about 50 days of the conflict's final year and closes with Hector's funeral.

The horse appears in the Odyssey instead, and only in three glancing moments, the way you'd mention a story your audience already knows by heart.

In one, Menelaus reminisces about the night the city fell.

Helen, he says, circled the horse three times, stroking its flanks and calling out to the hidden men in the voices of their own wives.

One of them came within a breath of answering, and Odysseus, the mastermind, clamped a hand over his mouth until Athena intervened and led her away.

In another, a blind bard at a foreign court sings of the sack at Odysseus' own request, and Odysseus, unrecognized at the table, starts weeping so quietly that only the king notices.

In the third, Odysseus stands in the underworld, telling the ghost of Achilles how his son sat inside the horse without trembling.

Homer also names the builder, a craftsman called Eppius, working with Athena's guidance.