The Mystery of the Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse is iconic and legendary, yet it is not mentioned even once in Homer's Iliad. In fact, in the entire eight texts of the Epic Cycle , it is only mentioned once and in passing in Odyssey, which tortures us with just a single line:

“A single horse captured Troy...

We have no firm idea what this ‘horse’ actually was. The traditional narrative is probably most well known, and the sequence of events is:

1. The Greeks lift the siege of Troy and retreat to sea, but only to hide out behind nearby Tenedos Isle.
2. A wooden statue is delivered to Troy’s gates by a man named Sinon. It was ostensibly meant as a gift to Pallas Athena - an expiatory gift to appease the Goddess for the Greeks' theft of the Palladium statue from inside Troy's temple suring the war. More importantly, it is a clear symbol of submission. The war is over!
3. Laocoon, the Trojan Priest of Poseidon, and Princess-seeress Cassandra demand that the horse is burnt or destroyed. Yet the Trojans, delirious with victory after 10 years of war, ignore them and drag the horse inside Troy.
4. That night, Sinon lets a small band of hidden Greeks out of belly of horse. They open the gates of Troy.
5. Sinon then gives a night torch signal to the hiding Greek fleet, who return to flood inside the city.

However, the notion of men hiding within the horse first appears only in the Roman age with Virgil's Aeneid. It does seem like a poetic invention.

There are many more theories, wide and varied:

• That it was a chariot wing of some sort that charged inside the city. This sounds fairly plausible as a military ambush manoeuvre, although it doesn't really tally with the 'single horse' mentioned in Odyssey.
• That Helen herself was the horse - the hidden enemy in the form of a Greek spy. This is intriguing, though something of a paradox - dubbing Helen the 'Trojan Horse' suggests the trope of the horse existed before the war in order for her to be tagged as such, doesn't it? Maybe not - the Greek lexicon indicates that horse ἵππος" can also mean unchaste woman (γυνὴ άσεμνη, ασελγής). So the metaphor could be that the Trojans let in an unchaste woman, namely Helen.
• That the horse was in fact a ship! Ships were known as ‘horses of the sea’. Could a boat falsely bearing Trojan sails have docked at the city's wharf, allowing the crew - possibly disguised or wearing Trojan armour - to disembark and enter the city?
• That it was an earthquake that pulled down Troy’s defences. The God Poseidon was thought to be the Lord of Earthquakes, and the mooted date ranges for the war coincide with an era that was known to be riddled with 'earthquake storms'.
• That the horse story arose from the actions of the rogue, Piyamaradu - who for decades terrorised the region of western Anatolia with the help of brigands and Ahhiyawan suport. It is thought that at some point in the 13th century BC, he duped the Trojan sentries, ousted the Trojan King and completed a bloodless coup of the city. As an action it seems plausible, but the 'horse' metaphor seems conspicuously absent here.

Was the Trojan Horse actually a chariot assault of some sort?

Or was it a coded reference to Helen of Troy - a Greek inside Troy's walls, after all?

Or was it a ship - a 'horse of the sea'? This image shows the God Poseidon driving horses across the waves. Poseidon was also God of Earthquakes...

...and Troy sits right on one of Anatolia's many slip faults.

There are even other theories, and the one makes most sense to me as a historian is that the horse was a siege device. Later writers Pausanius and Pliny the Elder were both convinced that this was the case, the former stating:

“Anyone who doesn't think the Trojans utterly stupid will have realized that the horse as really an engineer's device for breaking down the walls.

Siege technology in this age was advanced. Some devices were often named after animals – The Assyrian Horse, the Wild Ass, The Wooden One-Horned Animal.

​Assyrian tablets depict the first of these as a ram shed with a ‘neck and head’, the head containing a drillbit used to pick apart walls. One can see in it the visual resemblance with a horse.​​

An Assyrian engraving showing a 'siege horse'.

Angus McBride's depiction of the Assyrian siege horse.

An impression of such a device being used much further west, against Troy. Artwork by Donato Speladiere.

The siege engine theory is just one of many that I write of in my latest novel The Shadow of Troy!

What are your thoughts and theories? Please do leave your ideas in the comments section, below :)

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