The wooden horse: silence, song and the fall of Troy

The wooden horse: silence, song and the fall of Troy

The wooden horse enters Homer's Odyssey through people remembering Troy, while Virgil's Aeneid places it within a Trojan survivor's recollection of the city's fall. The poems do more than preserve a concealed-warriors trick. They assign the episode to different speakers and occasions: a conversation with a missing man's son, a singer's performance before an unnamed guest, and a survivor speaking to a queen. Their wooden structure becomes a setting for silence, a test of courage and an object whose supposed religious meaning helps an enemy enter the city.

In Odyssey Book 4, Telemachus visits Menelaus and Helen while seeking news of his father, Odysseus. Menelaus remembers sitting inside the horse with the Greek commanders. Helen walks around it three times, touches it and calls the men by name, imitating their wives' voices. Menelaus and Diomedes consider responding or leaving their hiding place. Odysseus restrains them. When Anticlus begins to speak, Odysseus covers his mouth and keeps it covered until Athena leads Helen away. Discovery is narrowly avoided through enforced silence inside the ambush.

The recollection follows Helen's own memory of Odysseus entering Troy in disguise. She says she recognized him and helped preserve his secret, adding that she had begun to long for home. Menelaus then attributes her approach to the horse to a god favouring the Trojans. These adjacent speeches give Helen different roles in Odysseus's survival and danger. The wooden horse episode is being remembered in a household where both speakers have complicated relationships with the war, while Telemachus mourns his father's continued absence.

In Odyssey Book 8, Odysseus himself listens to the bard Demodocus among the Phaeacians. His hosts still know him as a stranger. He requests the song of the horse made by Epeius with Athena's assistance and brought into Troy through Odysseus's stratagem. Demodocus begins with a divided Greek force: some burn their huts and sail away, while others wait inside the horse. The Trojans have already dragged it into their stronghold and debate breaking it apart, throwing it from the heights, or preserving it as an offering.

The choice to preserve it allows the concealed warriors to emerge. Demodocus sings of the city's capture, including Odysseus and Menelaus fighting at Deiphobus's house. The victorious warrior listening to that performance begins to weep. Homer's comparison is striking: his grief resembles a woman's lament over a husband killed defending his home, before she herself is taken into captivity. Alcinous notices the guest's distress and stops the singing. A feat of Greek military success has become inseparable from an image of suffering in the captured city.

Odyssey Book 11 returns to the horse in the meeting between Odysseus and the dead Achilles. Achilles wants news of his son, Neoptolemus. Odysseus describes the young warrior's behaviour during the ambush, when he himself controlled the opening and closing of the horse's door. Other leaders trembled and wiped away tears, but Neoptolemus remained eager to attack, holding sword and spear and urging the breakout. He subsequently left Troy unwounded with his share of the spoils. Achilles departs rejoicing in his son's prowess. Here the wooden horse contains a contrast between fear and impatient courage, and the memory serves a dead father's concern about the child who followed him into war.

Virgil's Aeneid Book 2 gives the deception a different emotional centre. Aeneas tells Queen Dido of Troy's final night. The Greeks hide selected soldiers inside a huge wooden horse while their fleet waits at Tenedos. Laocoon suspects a trap and drives a spear into its side. Sinon, presenting himself as a victim of the Greeks, supplies an explanation calculated to make the Trojans accept the structure. He claims it is an offering to Minerva and that bringing it inside would transfer the advantage to Troy.

The Trojans prepare wheels and ropes and make a breach for the horse. Cassandra's warning is heard but disbelieved. Night brings the fleet's return, Sinon opens the wooden horse, and the warriors descend by a cable before opening the gates to their companions. The precautions that might have kept an enemy outside have been undone by the people defending the city. Aeneas speaks from within that loss, recalling a supposed departure that concealed an imminent return.

Quintus Smyrnaeus offers another arrangement in Fall of Troy Book 12. Sinon volunteers to remain behind, accepting the danger of interrogation. The Trojans torture him, yet he maintains the false explanation that the horse is an offering. Laocoon calls for it to be burned; Athena blinds him, and the Trojans eventually lead Sinon into the city with pity. Epeius has put wooden rollers beneath the horse, and the crowd hauls it towards the walls. The divine intervention and Sinon's endurance have their own place in this poem's sequence. Shared characters and a shared device do not make all the surviving epic scenes identical.

• Homer — Odyssey Book 4, Samuel Butler translation, MIT Internet Classics Archive — classics.mit.edu
• Homer — Odyssey Book 8, Samuel Butler translation, MIT Internet Classics Archive — classics.mit.edu
• Homer — Odyssey Book 11, Samuel Butler translation, MIT Internet Classics Archive — classics.mit.edu
• Virgil — Aeneid Book 2, John Dryden translation, Project Gutenberg — www.gutenberg.org
• Quintus Smyrnaeus — Fall of Troy Book 12, A. S. Way translation, Theoi Classical Texts Library — www.theoi.com