What It Is
The Trojan Horse is the war machine with which the Greeks bring down Troy after ten years of siege: a fir horse the size of a mountain, which the Greek chiefs pretend to offer as a votive gift for their return, with chosen warriors shut inside its belly, while the fleet hides behind the island of Tenedos. Within the poem it is also an object of interpretation: no one in the city knows what it is, and the debate over what to do with it occupies the Trojans before the first blow. The one who tells of it is Aeneas, at the request of Dido, at the banquet in Carthage, and so the horse reaches the reader as the memory of a survivor who counts himself among the deceived.
Where It Appears
The whole episode is in Book II, which Aeneas opens by saying that the queen orders him to renew an unspeakable grief:
Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem, / Trojanas ut opes et lamentabile regnum / Eruerint Danai; quaeque ipse miserrima vidi / Et quorum pars magna fui, you command, O queen, that I renew an unspeakable grief: how the Danaans destroyed the Trojan riches and the kingdom worthy of tears, and the miseries I myself saw, and of which I was a great part.
The Trojans go out to look at the deserted camp and divide before the horse: Thymoetes wants to bring it inside the walls, while Capys and the more prudent want to throw it into the sea, burn it, or pierce its belly. Laocoön, priest of Neptune, comes running down from the citadel, warns the crowd, and drives his spear into the animal's flank, which rings hollow:
Aut aliquis latet error: equo ne credite, Teucri. / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes., some other deceit lies hidden here: do not trust the horse, Teucrians. Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans, even when they bring gifts.
Shepherds then bring in a young Greek with his hands bound, Sinon, who let himself be captured on purpose. He weeps, says the Greeks wanted to sacrifice him, and swears that the horse is an offering to Minerva, a work so huge that it cannot pass through the gates: if the Trojans wounded it, the ruin would fall on Priam, and if they took it into the city, Asia would carry the war to Greece. Moved, Priam orders him freed:
Talibus insidiis, perjurique arte Sinonis, / Credita res; captique dolis, lacrymisque coacti, / Quos neque Tydides, nec Larissaeus Achilles, / Non anni domuere decem, non mille carinae., by such ambushes and the art of the perjurer Sinon the thing was believed; we were taken by trickery and forced by tears, we whom neither Tydides nor Achilles of Larissa, nor ten years, nor a thousand ships had subdued.
Two sea serpents come out of Tenedos and kill Laocoön and his two sons, and the people conclude that he was punished for wounding the sacred wood. The Trojans open the wall and drag in the horse, which stumbles on the threshold with a clash of arms, and Aeneas breaks off the narration:
O patria, o divum domus Ilium, et inclyta bello / Moenia Dardanidum! quater ipso in limine portae / Substitit, atque utero sonitum quater arma dedere. / Instamus tamen immemores, caecique furore, O homeland, O Ilium, house of the gods, and famous walls of the Dardanians! Four times it halted on the very threshold of the gate, and four times the arms clashed in its belly. Still we pressed on, forgetful and blinded by fury.
In the middle of the festival, Cassandra speaks, and the poem gives her only two lines:
Tunc etiam fatis aperit Cassandra futuris / Ora, dei jussu non unquam credita Teucris., then, too, Cassandra opened her mouth to the fates to come, she who, by the god's order, was never believed by the Teucrians.
At night the fleet returns from Tenedos, Sinon opens the horse's belly, and the chiefs come out, kill the sentries, and open the gates. From the fall come the poem's exiles: Aeneas loses Troy, loses Creusa in the flight, and carries away the Penates.
In Book VI, in the descent to the world of the dead, the horse reappears through an unexpected mouth. Deiphobus, son of Priam, disfigured, tells Aeneas the last night from inside the palace: he begins with the fatal horse that leaped over the high walls and carried the armed infantry in its heavy belly, and then describes Helen, who, pretending a Bacchic chorus, called the Greeks from the height of the citadel with a torch and took the sword from under his pillow.
Illa, chorum simulans, Evantes orgia circum / Ducebat Phrygias: flammam media ipsa tenebat / Ingentem, et summa Danaos ex arce vocabat [...] Egregia interea conjux arma omnia tectis / Emovet, et fidum capiti subduxerat ensem, she, pretending to lead a chorus, led the Phrygian women in Bacchic rites around; she herself, in the middle, held an enormous flame and called the Danaans from the top of the citadel [...] Meanwhile the illustrious wife carried all the arms out of the house, and had taken the faithful sword from beneath my head.
What It Means
The horse is a gift that lies about its own nature. The city that resisted for ten years yields to the tears of one man, and the text sustains two readings: naivety, or the weariness of a siege that no one could bear any longer, since Sinon's story offers precisely the end of the war that the city wanted to hear. Aeneas, who already knows the end, attributes the fall to compassion, not to the strength of the Greeks.
Around the horse, religion becomes an instrument. Sinon uses Minerva to persuade, Laocoön's death is read as punishment for wounding the sacred wood, and Cassandra, who is right, is never believed, by the god's order. Laocoön, who is right only because he knows the enemy and has no divine sign, is silenced by a portent that the city interprets against him. The poem shows a city that listens only to what pleases it.
The Trojans receive warnings and do not heed them: the spear that rings hollow, the four stumbles on the threshold, the arms that clash in the belly. The narrator says that only the fates and the distracted minds of the Trojans kept the hiding place from being discovered, and Aeneas does not exempt himself, because he says "we pressed on," in the plural. Whoever tells Dido the fall accepts telling it as his own error too.
The horse is the opposite of what the Aeneid asks of its heroes: a sign that lies. The poem moves back and forth between false signs and true signs badly read, and Book III shows Aeneas learning to read signs and erring once more, with Crete, before the Penates correct him. The fall of Troy is the first misreading in the story of Rome, and Rome's destiny comes from that costly lesson.
Relationships
- Standard themes: War, Fate and Free Will, Home, Exile, and Return.
- Characters: Aeneas, Dido, Creusa.
- Nearby symbols: The Penates, what is saved from the night of the horse.