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Questions · The Iliad

Does the Trojan Horse appear in the Iliad?

No. The wooden horse is not told in the Iliad, because the poem ends before the fall of Troy. The action covers a few weeks of the tenth year of the war and ends in Book XXIV with Hector's funeral: "so they celebrated the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses." At that point the city still stands, with its walls and the Scaean Gates.

What the poem does is foretell the fall. Agamemnon says in Book IV: "the day will come when sacred Ilion will perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam." Hector repeats the line almost word for word to Andromache in Book VI, and Andromache foresees, in Book XXIV, the fate of the women and the son after the city is taken. In Book II, the omen of Aulis, which Odysseus recalls to the Greeks, says they will fight for as many years as the birds devoured, and that in the tenth they will take the city.

The poem also does not tell the death of Achilles. It is foretold several times: by his mother, Thetis, by the horse Xanthus, and by Hector himself as he dies, who says that Paris and Apollo will destroy him "beside the Scaean Gates." What exists of the war after the poem appears as prophecy, not as scene.

This choice of frame is part of what the poem is. Instead of telling the ten-year war, it tells the wrath of one man and what it costs, and leaves the end of the city for the reader to imagine. Whoever looks for the wooden horse will find the story in other narratives of the Trojan War, not in the twenty-four books of the Iliad.

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