The Iliad and the Odyssey

They thought it was a gift. It wasn’t.

For ten years, the Greeks had camped outside their walls. Now the ships were gone, and the beach where a thousand tents once stood was empty. At the city gates stood a horse taller than any man, carved from wood, offered to the gods as an apology for a war the Trojans believed they had finally won. They hadn’t.

The Gift That Wasn’t

That night, the city celebrated. Wine flowed in the streets. Families slept with their doors unlocked for the first time in a decade, and their gift horse stood watch in the square, silent and still, exactly as its makers intended. With the city asleep, a secret door opened and Greek soldiers emerged from the horse. The soldiers unlocked the city gates, allowing the just-returned soldiers to enter and present one of history’s most unwelcome surprises.

A Tale Often Told

The story of the Trojan Horse appears in the Odyssey, one of two epic poems that are the oldest surviving examples of Greek literature. Historians estimate the poems were written down in the eighth century before the Common Era, during the Dark Age of Ancient Greece. But the war they describe was said to have happened four centuries earlier, in a time the Greeks later called the Heroic Age.

The Trojan War

The Trojan War began when the Greeks set out to recover Helen. Paris was a prince of Troy and was infatuated with the most beautiful woman in the world. Helen was that woman. She was the daughter of Zeus and married to the Spartan king. Paris came to the king’s home as a guest, and while the host was away, Paris kidnapped Helen, stole the king’s treasure, and sailed home for Troy.

Helen of Troy became known as “the face that launched a thousand ships,” a phrase coined not by Homer, but by English playwright Christopher Marlowe nearly 2,000 years later. This detail is from Evelyn De Morgan’s 1898 painting exhibited at the British Museum. Photograph by the author.

The other Greek poli joined Sparta to send a fleet to retrieve Helen, but they were unable to breach Troy’s city walls. For ten long years, the Greeks held siege, but Troy managed to survive. That is, until the clever Odysseus came up with a plan, with help from the goddess Athena. He ordered the soldiers to construct a horse so massive it could never pass through the city gates. Inside the horse, thirty Greek soldiers would wait for nightfall. The Greeks burned their camp and sailed out of sight, leaving the horse behind. With the enemy gone, the Trojans felt safe enough to do the unthinkable: they tore down a section of their own wall to drag the horse inside.

The returning Greek army poured through the broken wall. By morning, the city had burned to the ground.

The Mystery of Homer

The epics are often attributed to a storyteller named Homer. We have only a few clues about who Homer might have been. He may have been one person or several. Homer may have been invented by the bards and never actually existed. We still do not know. The language of the Iliad and the Odyssey suggests that the poet came from the western coast of present-day Turkey, a clue that would eventually complete the story. Homer’s name can be translated as “blind,” but the vivid imagery of the Iliad and the Odyssey has led many to assume he must have had sight at some point in his life.

It is ironic that the face of one of history’s greatest storytellers remains a mystery. This marble bust in the British Museum is traditionally identified as Homer, but it comes from the imagination of the sculptor.

Finding Troy

In 1870, a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann, obsessed with the old poems since childhood, followed clues buried in the verses of the Iliad and the Odyssey to a quiet hill in western Turkey. There, he found not one lost city, but several, stacked on top of each other like pages in a book. One layer showed the unmistakable scars of fire and violent destruction, dated to almost exactly the time the war was said to have happened. Schliemann didn’t find the horse, but he may have found Troy.