What Is the Story of the Trojan Horse?

The Greeks had besieged Troy for ten years without breaking through its walls. According to the myth, they built an enormous hollow wooden horse, hid a group of soldiers inside, and sailed their fleet out of sight as if giving up.

The Trojans found the horse and a single Greek left behind, who told them it was an offering and that taking it inside would protect the city. They dragged it through the gates and celebrated. That night the hidden soldiers came out, opened the gates, and the returning Greek army took Troy.

This is worth knowing. The Trojan horse is not in Homer's Iliad, which ends before the fall of the city. It appears briefly in the Odyssey and is told in full much later, most famously in the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid.

So the story of the Trojan horse reached us through several hands across centuries. That is normal for world mythology, where the most famous version is often not the oldest one.

There was a real city at the site archaeologists identify as Troy, in modern Turkey, and it was destroyed and rebuilt many times. Whether the war happened as described is a much harder question.

Most historians treat the Trojan war as a story shaped around distant memories rather than a report. There is no evidence for a wooden horse. Some have suggested it could be a poetic image for a siege engine or an earthquake, but these remain guesses.

The phrase survived because the idea is so clear. A Trojan horse is anything that gets past your defences by looking like a gift:

• •In computing, a Trojan is malicious software disguised as something useful
• •In politics, a policy can be called a Trojan horse for a hidden agenda
• •In everyday speech it means a welcome looking thing with a hidden risk

Two figures tried to stop the Trojans and were ignored, which is part of why the story stays memorable. The priest Laocoon warned against the horse and was killed along with his sons by sea serpents, an event the Trojans read as divine disapproval of his warning.

Cassandra, a Trojan princess, had been given prophecy and then cursed so that nobody would believe her. She saw exactly what would happen and could not convince anyone. Her name has become a term for a person whose accurate warnings are dismissed, which is arguably the most useful thing the whole myth has given us.

The site usually identified as Troy is a mound called Hisarlik, near the Dardanelles strait in north-west Turkey. In the 1870s the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann dug there, building on earlier work and ideas from the British resident Frank Calvert. Schliemann was eager to find Homer's city and cut a deep trench through the mound. His methods were crude by modern standards, and he destroyed much of the upper evidence while searching for the level he believed was Priam's Troy. He even misidentified a much earlier layer as the Homeric city.

Later archaeologists showed that the mound holds many settlements stacked on top of one another, now numbered from Troy I at the bottom to Troy IX at the top. The layers known as Troy VI and Troy VIIa, from the late Bronze Age, are most often discussed as possible matches for a Trojan war, because they show a substantial walled city and signs of destruction. Even so, a burnt layer cannot tell you who caused the fire, which is why the connection with Homer's story remains debated.

The surviving sources add details that make the plan feel human. The horse was built by a craftsman named Epeius with the help of the goddess Athena, and the scheme is usually credited to Odysseus. In the Odyssey, Menelaus recalls a tense moment when Helen walked around the horse calling out to the hidden Greek leaders, imitating the voices of their wives. Some were tempted to answer, and Odysseus had to hold them back by force. One careless reply would have exposed everyone.

Virgil's Aeneid gives a name to the Greek left behind: Sinon. He claimed he had escaped being sacrificed by his own side and spun a convincing story that the horse was an offering to Athena, deliberately made too large to fit through the gates so that Troy could not gain its protection. Before this, Laocoon warns the Trojans with a line usually translated as I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts, which is the source of the saying beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Homer's poems were not the only ancient epics about Troy. A group of works known as the Epic Cycle filled in the rest of the war, including the Little Iliad and the Sack of Troy, which told how the horse was built, brought into the city and used to end the siege. These poems are lost, and their plots are known mainly from brief summaries made centuries later. The Odyssey itself includes a striking scene in which the bard Demodocus sings about the wooden horse at a royal feast, and Odysseus, still an unnamed guest, hides his face and weeps.

Art shows that the story was popular long before Virgil. One of the earliest known images appears on a large clay storage jar found on the Greek island of Mykonos in 1961 and dated to the seventh century BC. In relief it shows the horse on wheels, with small hatch-like openings in its side through which the faces of armed warriors look out. Other panels on the jar show the brutal killing of women and children after the city falls. Images like this show that Greek audiences knew the trick, and its grim consequences, centuries before the Romans retold it.

The ancient sources dwell on what happened once the gates were open, and much of it was shameful even by the standards of the myth. Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, killed the aged King Priam at the altar of Zeus where he had taken refuge. Hector's infant son Astyanax was thrown from the city walls so that he could never grow up to avenge his father. The lesser Ajax dragged Cassandra away from the statue of Athena she was clinging to, an outrage against the goddess inside her own temple.

Those crimes shaped the stories that followed. Athena, who had helped the Greeks build the horse, turned against them and sent storms that scattered their fleets on the way home. The lesser Ajax drowned, Menelaus was driven off course to Egypt, Agamemnon was murdered soon after reaching home, and Odysseus wandered for ten more years. Virgil viewed the night from the losing side. In the Aeneid, Aeneas escapes the burning city carrying his elderly father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his young son by the hand, beginning the journey that Roman legend linked to the founding of Rome.

The story of the Trojan horse is a myth about winning through cunning rather than force, told long after Homer, and it has given us one of the most useful phrases in the language.