Did the Trojan Horse Really Exist?

The story of the Trojan Horse has been celebrated for thousands of years as a tale of cunning deception: Frustrated after 10 years of war, ancient Greek warriors hid inside a large hollow wooden horse that the Trojans carried in triumph inside their city walls, then the Greeks snuck out at night to sack Troy.

But at least one later Greek writer was struck by the gullibility of the Trojans in falling for this obvious ploy. The second-century geographer Pausanias described it as anoia—"folly" or "utter silliness." Some modern writers have the same idea. Just why the Trojans were fooled by the Trojan Horse, without first checking inside it for enemy warriors, is more complicated than it may seem.

"Pausanias is great and all, but he and others are a thousand years after Homer," says University of Toronto classical literature scholar Jonathan Burgess, author of The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. He says Pausanias is “being over-rationalistic” and falling into a common trap by treating Homer’s poetry—and his poetic descriptions of the Trojan War—as things that actually happened, instead of symbolic events in a fictional story. “But it’s myth,” Burgess says, adding, “The wooden horse is not nearly as strange or fantastic as most of the story.”

Homer doesn't actually say much about the Trojan Horse. The Iliad takes place weeks or months before the Trojan War ends, and the The Odyssey mentions it only twice. It comes up in Book 4, when the Spartan king Menelaus—his wife Helen returned—recounts the trick; and in Book 11, when Odysseus tells the ghost of the hero Achilles that his son Neoptolemus was among those who hid in the horse and sacked Troy. Otherwise, what is now known about the original story comes from two long poems, now lost but summarized by others, in the ancient Greek Epic Cycle. It was later embellished by the first-century Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid and other writers.

University of Oxford classicist Armand D'Angour, author of The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience, says archaeology indicates a war destroyed Troy VI—the sixth of nine ancient city layers discovered during excavations at Hisarlık near Turkey's Aegean coast. The site dates to the Late Bronze Age, about 3,200 years ago, and may be Homer's Troy.

That suggests Homer's epics contain echoes of true events, and the Trojan Horse may be one of them. "I like the theory that the 'horse' was based on the notion of a wooden siege engine covered in horse hides," D'Angour says. Many scholars have proposed the Trojan Horse was actually a siege engine of some sort—possibly a battering ram. There are also suggestions that Troy VI was destroyed by an earthquake, in which case the Trojan Horse could have symbolized such a disaster: Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, was also the god of horses and earthquakes.

D'Angour doesn't think the Trojan Horse was an earthquake, but he reasons there may have been some truth in the story. "What a feat of imagination that would be, if there were in fact no material counterpart," he says.

Whether truth or myth, the excavations at Hisarlık and the discovery of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870 shaped modern archaeology. "The myth served to inspire people like Schliemann to uncover ancient structures at Troy and Mycenaean palaces, but none of this proves a war," Burgess says. "I find it odd that it has taken up so much oxygen, when it’s Homer and myth that are important—and the only real things."

The Roman poet Virgil never questioned the Trojans falling for the Trojan Horse hoax, but his Aeneid suggests a reason why. According to the poem, which wove the mythical origins of the Romans with events of Homer's epics, a cunning warrior named Sinon stayed behind when the Greeks appeared to have fled their siege of Troy, leaving only the great wooden horse on the beach. Sinon pretended to be a deserter, and told the Trojans that the Greeks had left the wooden horse as an offering to the Olympian gods, whereupon the Trojans seized it to claim the honor for themselves.

According to Virgil, a Trojan priest of Apollo named Laocoön warned of danger, declaring "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”—Latin, which means “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts” in English. But the gods sent two snakes to strangle Laocoön and his sons, which the Trojans took as a sign of divine wrath. They then carried the great horse inside Troy—and the rest is history, maybe.