Homer, Odyssey 8.492–520 — The Wooden Horse and the Sack of Troy

At the court of the Phaeacians, Odysseus asks Demodocus to sing the story of the Wooden Horse. The bard’s song links Epeius, Athena, Odysseus, the hidden Achaean warriors, and the destruction of Troy.

This is the principal Homeric passage behind the Trojan-Horse material in The Ship Remembers, Pt. 1.

It is also a useful corrective to overly simple retellings. Homer does not say that Odysseus personally built the Horse. He says Epeius made it with Athena’s help, while Odysseus brought the stratagem into the citadel and filled the Horse with the warriors who would sack the city.

38th Scroll Translation

Come now, change your song and sing the ordering of the Wooden Horse, which Epeius made together with Athena, the device that glorious Odysseus once brought into the citadel, after filling it with the men who sacked Ilios. If you tell these things to me in due order, I will declare at once to all humankind that a gracious god has granted you inspired song.

So he spoke. The bard, stirred by the god, began his song. He took up the tale where the Argives boarded their well-benched ships and sailed away after setting fire to their huts, while the others around renowned Odysseus already sat hidden in the Horse in the Trojan assembly-place; for the Trojans themselves had dragged it into the citadel.

There it stood while they argued around it. Three plans pleased them: to split the hollow timber with pitiless bronze, to drag it to the height and throw it from the rocks, or to leave it as a great offering to appease the gods. That last course was destined to prevail, for fate had ordained the city’s destruction once it enclosed the great Wooden Horse, where the best of the Argives sat bringing death and doom to the Trojans.

Then he sang how the sons of the Achaeans poured from the Horse, leaving the hollow ambush and sacking the city. He sang how different men ravaged lofty Troy in different places, and how Odysseus went like Ares with godlike Menelaus toward the house of Deiphobus. There, he said, Odysseus dared the fiercest battle and finally prevailed through great-hearted Athena.

From the Text to The Ship Remembers

Part 1 remembers Troy at the moment when victory seems to have opened the road home. The Horse becomes the symbol of the intelligence that ended a ten-year war.

The bitter irony of the cycle is that the same Odysseus whose name becomes attached to this triumph later endangers his own nostos when he insists on attaching his name to the blinding of Polyphemus.