The Trojan Horse: the Story of the Trick That Ended the Trojan War

The Trojan Horse is the trick that ends the Trojan War: a giant hollow wooden horse, left outside the city as an offering to Athena, with the best Greek warriors hidden inside. Devised by Odysseus and built by the craftsman Epeius, it was hauled inside the walls by the Trojans themselves. That night the warriors climbed out, opened the gates to the army that had quietly returned, and Troy fell after ten years of siege. The Iliad never mentions it, since the poem ends before the city falls. The story comes from the Odyssey, from the lost epics of the Trojan Cycle, and above all from Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid.

Why the Greeks needed a trick

Near the end of the tenth year, the war was going badly for the Greeks. Achilles was dead, shot by Paris with Apollo’s help, and Ajax had killed himself after losing the contest for Achilles’ armor to Odysseus. The walls of Troy, built by Poseidon and Apollo for King Laomedon, would not give way to assault.

According to Proclus’s summary of the Little Iliad, several conditions still had to be met: the Greeks had to fetch Heracles’ bow from Philoctetes and bring Achilles’ son Neoptolemus to Troy. Odysseus also slipped into the city disguised as a beggar, and with Diomedes he stole the Palladium, the guardian image of Athena. Only then does the horse appear.

Who built the Trojan Horse?

The sources split the credit three ways.

• Athena inspires it. In the Odyssey (8.493) the bard Demodocus sings of “the horse of wood which Epeius made with Athena’s help,” and the Little Iliad says Epeius built it at the goddess’s prompting.
• Epeius, son of Panopeus, does the work. The Iliad knows him only as the unbeaten boxer at Patroclus’s funeral games (23.664-699), but later tradition makes him the army’s master carpenter. Apollodorus says he felled the timber on Mount Ida.
• Odysseus has the idea, according to Apollodorus (Epitome 5.14), and leads the ambush: in the Odyssey (11.524-525) he is the one in charge of opening and closing the hatch.

On its side, Apollodorus reports, the Greeks carved a dedication: “For their return home, the Greeks dedicate this thank-offering to Athena.” That turned the horse into a holy object that would be sacrilege to destroy.

Who was inside the Trojan Horse?

The number of warriors is one of the best-known variants. Apollodorus gives fifty of the bravest, while noting that the author of the Little Iliad counted three thousand. Virgil (Aeneid 2.261-264) names nine: Thessandrus, Sthenelus, Ulysses, Acamas, Thoas, Neoptolemus, Machaon, Menelaus and Epeius himself. Quintus of Smyrna lists around thirty, Diomedes among them.

The Odyssey gives a view from inside. In the Underworld, Odysseus tells the shade of Achilles that the other leaders wept and shook in the dark, but Neoptolemus never went pale; he kept begging to be let out and gripping the hilt of his sword (11.523-537). The son proved himself before the fighting had even begun.

Meanwhile the rest of the army burned its huts, boarded the ships and hid behind the island of Tenedos, as if the Greeks had given up.

The Trojans’ debate

At dawn the Trojans found an empty beach and the horse. Demodocus, in the Odyssey (8.505-510), sums up three proposals: split the hollow timber with bronze, drag it to the edge of the cliffs and throw it down, or leave it as an offering to appease the gods. The last view won, because Troy, the poet says, was fated to perish once it took in the great wooden horse.

Two voices spoke against it.

Cassandra, daughter of Priam, declared that the horse held armed men. Cursed by Apollo never to be believed, she was ignored. In Quintus of Smyrna (Book 12) she even rushes at the horse with an axe and a torch, and the Trojans hold her back.

Laocoon, a priest of Apollo or of Poseidon depending on the source, is the more famous. In Virgil he runs down from the citadel crying “I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts” (Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, 2.49), and hurls his spear into the horse’s flank, which booms hollow.

Sinon, the essential liar

Just as Laocoon had nearly won the crowd over, shepherds dragged in a captured Greek. This was Sinon, who had stayed behind on purpose. In Virgil (2.57-198) he plays the deserter: Odysseus had persecuted him, the Greeks had meant to sacrifice him for a fair wind, and he had escaped. Then he explains the horse. It is an offering to atone for the theft of the Palladium, and the Greeks made it enormous so that it could not pass through the gates. Once inside the city, it would become Troy’s protection.

Quintus of Smyrna makes it harsher: the Trojans torture Sinon and cut off his nose and ears, and still he sticks to his story. In the Sack of Ilium and in Apollodorus, Sinon has a second job as well: to light the fire signal that will call the fleet back.

The death of Laocoon

Then came the turning point. Two giant serpents swam across from Tenedos, seized Laocoon’s two sons and then the priest himself as he tried to save them, and crushed them to death (Aeneid 2.199-227). Their work done, they glided to Athena’s shrine and hid beneath the goddess’s shield. The Trojans read it as punishment: Laocoon had struck a sacred offering.

The sources disagree on who sent the serpents and on who died. In the Sack of Ilium, as Proclus summarizes it, the serpents kill Laocoon and one of his sons. Apollodorus says Apollo sent them and that they killed only the sons. In Quintus, Athena first blinds Laocoon before the serpents devour his children. Virgil’s version, with the father dying alongside his sons, is the one fixed in stone by the Laocoon Group, unearthed in Rome in 1506 and now in the Vatican Museums; Pliny the Elder credited it to three Rhodian sculptors, Agesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus (Natural History 36.37).

The horse enters Troy

The Trojans breached their own wall to bring the horse in, a detail found both in the Little Iliad and in Virgil. In the Aeneid (2.242-243) the horse stalls four times on the threshold, and four times the weapons clang inside its belly. No one takes the hint.

That evening the hidden men faced one last test. In the Odyssey (4.271-289), Menelaus recalls how Helen, with Deiphobus at her side, walked three times around the horse, calling out the Greek leaders by name in the voices of their wives. Diomedes and Menelaus were tempted to answer or rush out; one Anticlus was about to speak, and Odysseus clamped his hands over the man’s mouth until Athena led Helen away. The scene leaves open the question that follows Helen through the whole tradition: was she trying to expose the Greeks, or to warn them?

The sack of Troy

While the city celebrated the end of the war, Sinon unbarred the hatch or lit the beacon, depending on the version. The warriors climbed down, killed the sentries and opened the gates to the army returning from Tenedos. The sack began. Neoptolemus cut down Priam at the altar of Zeus Herkeios, Astyanax, Hector’s son, was hurled from the walls, Cassandra was dragged from Athena’s statue by Ajax son of Oileus, and Menelaus found Helen.

Aeneas was among the Trojans who escaped the slaughter, along with his father and his son. Virgil gives him the task of telling the story of that night at Dido’s court. In the Sack of Ilium, he even leaves for Mount Ida as soon as Laocoon dies, alarmed by the omen.

How the ancient sources differ

• Homer knows the horse without telling the whole story. The Iliad is silent; the Odyssey offers three glimpses: Helen’s test (Book 4), Demodocus’s song (Book 8) and Neoptolemus’s courage (Book 11). Already the horse is Odysseus’s glory.
• The Epic Cycle (Lesches’ Little Iliad, Arctinus’ Sack of Ilium), known through Proclus’s summaries, adds the breach in the wall, Sinon, Laocoon’s death and Aeneas’s departure.
• Apollodorus (Epitome 5.14-21) gives the fullest prose account: Odysseus’s plan, the timber from Ida, the inscription, the fifty men, Apollo’s serpents.
• Virgil (Aeneid 2) gives the version that became canonical, told from the Trojan side: Laocoon’s speech, Sinon’s long lie, the horse stalling four times at the gate.
• Quintus of Smyrna and Tryphiodorus, Greek poets of the Roman imperial period, fill in the details: Sinon’s torture, Cassandra with her axe, the roll call of warriors.

Trick, siege engine or Poseidon’s horse?

Ancient readers were already asking what the horse really stood for. Pausanias (1.23.8), describing a bronze horse dedicated on the Athenian Acropolis, says that anyone who does not credit the Trojans with utter stupidity knows Epeius’s work was a device for breaching the wall. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 7.202) credits Epeius with inventing the siege “horse” that was later called the battering ram.

Some modern readings link the horse to Poseidon, god of horses and earthquakes and an enemy of Troy in the Iliad: the horse might stand for an earthquake that brought the walls down. These remain hypotheses, and none of them replaces the meaning the Greeks themselves gave the story: Troy fell to Odysseus’s intelligence, with Athena’s help, and to the Trojans’ own blindness.

The legacy of the Trojan Horse

The horse is one of the earliest mythological scenes in Greek art. The Mykonos pithos, a large storage jar from the seventh century BC now in the Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, already shows a horse on wheels with hatches through which the warriors peer out. Laocoon’s warning became the proverb “beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” and “Trojan horse” now means anything that smuggles an enemy inside, including the malicious programs disguised as legitimate software that computer security has called Trojan horses since the 1970s.

Further reading

The wider story is told in the Trojan War, and what happened next to the man behind the trick in the Odyssey. The Odysseus page covers the man of many turns, and Athena the goddess who guided Epeius. For the Trojans who saw the truth, read Cassandra and Priam; for the woman who circled the horse, Helen of Troy. The city itself has its own page: Troy.