The Trojan War (20 page)

Indeed, epic sees divine handiwork in the whole affair. The Bronze Age liked to believe that prowess wins battles, but seasoned warriors know that cunning trumps brute force. The best way to state this unpleasant truth was to bring in the gods. According to the
Little Iliad,
Athena willed the outcome.

The Trojan girls' verdict was reported to the Greeks, and Odysseus was declared the victor. Ajax, the original sore loser, went completely mad. Eventually he committed suicide, but not before destroying the cattle of the Greeks. Killing the animals was no small thing, since the cattle represented all the effort that had gone into many raids, usually led by Achilles, and they represented wealth to bring home, sacrifices to the gods, and food for the troops. The
Little Iliad
says that Ajax so angered “the king” (Agamemnon?) that he was denied the usual funeral pyre, and consigned instead to a funerary urn or coffin. Among the Greeks, unlike the Romans, suicide was not considered to be an honorable end.

As for Ajax's burial, cremation was not the norm for Bronze Age kings in Greece but it was for Hittite royalty. And it was obviously an option at Troy. In a cemetery of the 1300s
B.C.
at the Trojan Harbor, excavators found both cremation burials (that is, the bones and teeth left after cremation) and simple internments (that is, the skeletons left from the burial of unburned bodies). Some of these included Greek artifacts.

Neither side had achieved its objective in the pitched battles that followed the deaths of Hector and Achilles. But it would not be true to say that these battles accomplished nothing. In fact, they were without a doubt the most important confrontations of the war because they were nearly the last. They cleared the decks for one final attempt at an indirect, low-intensity strategy.

From the strategic point of view, the story of the Trojan girls, Ajax's suicide, and Odysseus's triumph sets the stage for the new phase of war. Odysseus was the apostle of unconventional warfare. His moment had finally come. Earlier, Agamemnon had shown good sense by listening to Nestor when it came to the toughest decisions; now, he listened to Odysseus.

Odysseus's first act was to lay an ambush for Helenus, Priam's seer son. Once caught, the seer told the Greeks what he considered to be the secret to success: bring Philoctetes and his bow, which had once belonged to Heracles, and Troy would fall. Philoctetes was a Thessalian warrior who had sailed with the Greeks from Aulis but never reached Troy. He had been bitten by a snake on an Aegean island, either on Lemnos (according to Homer) or Tenedos (according to the
Cypria
) and the venom had left him with a disgusting wound. As a result, the Greeks abandoned him on the island. Now, Odysseus sent Diomedes on a mission to bring Philoctetes.

The physician Machaon was able to heal Philoctetes. Why he was successful this time but not earlier is unclear. But war is often a spur for technology, including the technology of healing, and a process of trial and error on all too many patients might have taught the physician a new herbal recipe or two.

With the bow of Heracles, Philoctetes avenged Achilles by killing Paris. The triumphant Greeks took the body and Menelaus wasted no time in showing his anger by treating the corpse with complete contempt. But the Trojans fought back and recovered what was left of Paris. He was given a decent burial. Trojan custom required that his widow cut short the time spent wearing mournful black. And shortly afterward Helen married his brother Deïphobus. This “levirate marriage” was common ancient Near Eastern practice, found in Ugarit and among the Hittites as well as in the Hebrew Bible. But it was not practiced in Iron Age Greece, which points to the poet's knowledge of non-Greek mores. In levirate marriage a brother is required to marry the widow of his deceased brother. The custom is a reminder that ancient marriage was less about romance than about cementing family alliances and securing male protectors for women.

In Helen's case, her third marriage was either forced on her by the Trojans or it was a sign that she had no desire to return home to face Menelaus—or both. And Helen was still an exceptionally beautiful woman. Ten years later, in the
Odyssey,
she still could be described as looking “like Artemis with her golden arrows.”

The generals continued to pay more attention to Ares than to Aphrodite. Both sides were eager for new allies. Homer and the Epic Cycle agree that both parties turned to a new generation of warriors, the sons of the men who had started the conflict. That would have been possible if the Trojan War had really lasted ten years but since it was a much shorter conflict, this detail will have to be ascribed to myth. In any case, the epic tradition says that Odysseus went to the island of Scyros, where he found Achilles' son, Neoptolemus. Having handed over his father's armor, Odysseus convinced the young man to come to Troy to fight in his father's cause. Meanwhile, Priam secured the son of Telephus of Mysia, Eurypylus, as well as the troops under his command. This brought public-relations as well as practical benefit because, like Philoctetes, Eurypylus had a connection to Heracles, who was his paternal grandfather. Priam is also said to have given Eurypylus's mother an exceptionally large gift to win her permission.

Like Neoptolemus, Eurypylus was evidently a very young man, or he would not have required his mother's consent. Such reinforcements came at a very heavy price, since Priam could hardly have been in a mood for largesse at this point in the war, while Odysseus could not have relished giving up the armor that he had competed so hard for. But the stakes were too high to hesitate.

Eurypylus came to Troy and deployed his men on the battlefield, where—naturally—he is said to have fought with distinction. But he was soon to fall to Neoptolemus's spear.

Odysseus was on the verge of a propaganda coup. He sneaked into Troy on what turned out to be the first of two secret missions. The
Odyssey
reports that Odysseus took great pains to camouflage himself, not only exchanging his armor for rags but changing his appearance by striking his face with a whip or a stick until it swelled up. Nobody recognized him in Troy except Helen. Years later, telling the story back in Sparta, she claimed to have helped Odysseus with no less than a bath, a rubdown, and a fresh set of clothes. But she badgered him until he revealed his strategy. As usual, Helen wanted something in return for her attention.

Helen also alleges that, in part thanks to her help, Odysseus killed many Trojans before slipping back out of town. But what was he doing in Troy? Possibly scouting out the target for his second mission. Some sources say Diomedes went along too. Their object was the Trojans' holiest of holies, the Palladium.

In classical Athens, armed Athena was known as Pallas Athena. Roman-era sources usually describe the Palladium as a wooden statuette of the goddess Athena in arms. Whether the Trojans worshipped Athena is unclear, but the mother goddess was venerated everywhere in Anatolia, so an image of some female divinity might well indeed have held a central place in the Trojan pantheon. Stealing the Palladium was a coup that surely gave a lift to the Greeks while devastating Trojan morale.

In classical times, Greek gods and goddesses commonly had larger-than-life-size statues. But in Late Bronze Age Anatolia and Greece, figurines were a familiar way of representing a deity. The wealthy Hittite capitals had monumental sculptures of the gods, but figurines made of wood and plated with precious metal were more common. Or perhaps the Palladium was just a simple pillar or a stele such as those outside Troy's city gates. Like the sacred medicine bundles carried in animal skins by certain Native American peoples, the Palladium was considered to contain a power beyond its size.

Stealing the enemy's god could be very successful psychological warfare. But for some ancient peoples, it was even more: the Hittites and, many centuries later, the Romans, believed that they could actually bring a particular god over to their side.

The Greeks had tried everything, to no avail. Many of them might have felt as frustrated as the Hittite commanders who, in spite of every effort, despaired of having to leave an enemy town unscathed. But rather than despair, Odysseus sought a war-winning “wonder weapon,” to use a modern term of art. Heracles' bow and Achilles' armor were miraculous objects that led to the deaths of Paris and Eurypylus; it was thought that the theft of the Palladium would weaken Troy. That is, if the thieves had been successful: the
Sack of Ilium
says that Odysseus did not seize the real Palladium but rather a fake, set up long before to trick thieves. That would have been a good story for Priam to put out to steady the Trojans' morale.

The walls of Troy stood firm. But were the Trojans still as committed to defending them? Achilles and Ajax were dead, but Odysseus had gone from strength to strength, with Philoctetes and Neoptolemus now at his side. Meanwhile, Eurypylus, Memnon, and Penthesilea had all come and gone, Hector and Paris were dead, Priam had demeaned himself before Achilles, Helenus had been captured by the enemy and had given up state secrets, and Helen was treating with the enemy. It was time for the Trojans to pray that Boreas would blow the Greek ships back home.

H
e is the last Greek at Troy. Pale in morning's light, he looks like a weak and ragged runaway. But looks can deceive. Sinon, as he is called, claims to be a deserter—the only Greek remaining when the entire enemy and its cursed fleet had suddenly departed. But can he be trusted? His name, Sinon, means “pest,” “bane,” or “misfortune” in Greek, leading some historians to consider it a nickname, like “the Desert Fox” for German general Ernst Rommel, or a generic name, like “Bones” for a military doctor. Sinon played a key role in the plot to take Troy, although he is often forgotten, overshadowed by the most famous trick in Western civilization.

The famous horse may be imagined as a tall and well-crafted wooden structure, towering over the wildflowers of the Scamander River plain. Its body is made of the pine of Mount Ida, a tree known today as
Pinus equi troiani,
“Trojan Horse Pine,” and renowned since antiquity as a material for shipbuilding. The horse's eyes are obsidian and amber, its teeth ivory. Its crest, made of real horsehair, streams in the breeze. Its hooves shine like polished marble. And hidden inside are nine Greek warriors.

Everyone knows the story. The Greeks are said to have packed up their men, horses, weapons, and booty, set fire to their huts, and departed at night for the nearby island of Tenedos, where they hid their ships. All that they left behind was the Trojan Horse and a spy, Sinon, pretending to be a deserter.

The Trojans were amazed to discover that after all these years, the enemy had slunk home. But what were they to do with the Horse? After a fierce debate, they brought it into the city as an offering to Athena. There were wild celebrations. The Trojans underestimated the cunning of their adversaries. That night, the men inside the horse sneaked out and opened the city's gates to the men of the Greek fleet, who had taken advantage of Troy's drunken distraction to sail back from Tenedos. They proceeded to sack the city and win the war.

Everyone knows the story but nobody loves the Trojan Horse. Although scholars disagree about much of the Trojan War, they nearly all share the conviction that the Trojan Horse is a fiction. From Roman times on, there have been theories that the Trojan Horse was really a siege tower, or an image of a horse on a city gate left unlocked by pro-Greek Antenor, or a metaphor for a new Greek fleet because Homer calls ships “horses of the sea,” or a symbol of the god Poseidon, who destroyed Troy in an earthquake, or a folktale similar to those found in Egyptian literature and the Hebrew Bible. There has been every sort of theory about the Trojan Horse except that it really existed.

Many of these theories sound convincing, particularly the horse-as-siege engine, since Bronze Age Assyrians named their siege towers after horses, among other animals. But sometimes a horse is just a horse. Although epic tradition might exaggerate the details of the Trojan Horse and misunderstand its purpose, that the object existed and that it played a role in tricking the Trojans into leaving their city without defenses might just be true.

More about the Horse presently: in the meantime, let us return to the spy whom the Greeks had left behind. Although Sinon is less dramatic than the famous Horse, he was no less effective as an agent of subversion, and he inspires far more confidence as a genuine historical figure. The Trojan Horse is unique and improbable, although not impossible. But Sinon plays a well-attested role in unconventional warfare as it was waged in the Bronze Age.

In Vergil's retelling in the
Aeneid,
Sinon pretends to be a deserter in order to work his way into Troy. He testifies that the Greeks have left for good and argues that the Trojan Horse is a genuine gift and not some trick. Eventually, after a stormy debate, the Trojans decide to bring the Horse into the city.

Deceit is not unique to the Trojan saga; it was a fundamental ingredient in Hittite military doctrine. Consider some examples: A king broke off the siege of a fortress with the approach of winter, only to send his general back to storm the unsuspecting city after it had gone off alert. A general sent agents into the opposing camp before battle, where they pretended to be deserters and tricked the enemy into letting down his guard. Another king attacked a neighbor via a roundabout route to avoid enemy scouts. Nor were the Hittites alone in their use of trickery. For example, the siege of one Mesopotamian city by another involved sneak attacks at night and the impersonation of an allied unit of soldiers in an attempt to lull the besieged into opening their gates. (It failed.)

Think of the fall of Troy not as a myth about a Horse but as an example of unconventional warfare, Bronze Age style. The Trojan Horse might be better known as the Trojan Red Herring. Everyone focuses on the Horse but the real story lies elsewhere. In fact, it would be possible to leave out the Trojan Horse and yet tell a credible and coherent narrative of the capture of Troy much as the ancients told it.

Without the Trojan Horse, the story might go like this: The Greeks decided to trick the Trojans into thinking they had gone home when, in fact, they had merely retreated to Tenedos. Once they had lulled the enemy into dropping his guard, they planned to return in a surprise attack—at night. To know when to move, the Greeks would look for a lighted-torch signal, to be given by a Greek in Troy who had pretended to turn traitor and desert. Signals were used often in ancient battles, most famously at Marathon (490
B.C.
), when a Greek traitor in the hills flashed a shield in the sunlight to communicate with the Persians. In the clear skies of the Mediterranean, fire signals could be seen from far off. They were visible as smoke signals during the day and as beacons at night. Tests show that the signals were visible between mountaintops up to a distance of two hundred miles.

At the sign, the Greeks would row back rapidly to Troy. The final part of the plan required a few men inside Troy to open the city gate. These men might either have been Trojan traitors or Greeks who had sneaked into the city. With the emergency supposedly over, Troy's gatekeepers would not have proved difficult to overcome.

Compare the set of tricks by which the south Italian port city of Tarentum was betrayed in turn to Hannibal and then to the Romans. In 213
B.C.
a pro-Carthaginian citizen of Tarentum arranged for Carthaginian soldiers to come back with him from a nighttime hunting expedition. The soldiers wore breastplates and held swords under their buckskins; they even carried a wild boar in front, to appear authentic. Once the city gate was opened to them, they slaughtered the guards, and Hannibal's army rushed in. Four years later, the Romans under Fabius Maximus recaptured the city by having a local girl seduce the commander of Hannibal's garrison. He agreed to guide Roman troops over the walls at night while Fabius's ships created a distraction at the harbor wall on the other side of town. Although these events took place a thousand years after the Trojan War, they could easily have been carried out with Bronze Age technology.

The Greek plan at Troy was to trick the enemy into dropping his guard. It worked: the Trojans relaxed. At that point, one Greek inside the city lit a signal fire to bring the Greek fleet back and then others opened a gate.

The island of Tenedos lies about seven miles (six nautical miles) from the Trojan Harbor. The Greeks might have moored their ships in one of the sheltered coves on the island's east coast, near Troy but out of sight. At a rate of about five knots (about that of a thirty-two-oared Scandinavian longship traveling one hundred miles) they could have covered the distance in little more than an hour. That is, in daylight; the trip would no doubt have taken longer at night. But the
Sack of Ilium
claims it was a moonlit night and, anyhow, Bronze Age armies knew how to march by night. So the trip from Tenedos took perhaps no more than two hours. From the Trojan Harbor it was another five miles by land to Troy. It was nighttime and the road was primitive but the Greeks knew it well. They could have covered the distance in three hours. Athenian sources claim the month was Thargelion, roughly modern May. At that time of year, sunrise at Troy is 5:30–6
A
.
M
., sunset 8–8:30
P
.
M
. If the Greeks left Tenedos at, say, 9
P
.
M
., and if everything went without a hitch, they would have arrived at Troy between 2 and 3
A
.
M
., that is, about three hours before sunrise. A forced march may have gotten the Greeks to Troy an hour or so earlier.

To carry out their plan, the Greeks had had to infiltrate a small group of soldiers into the city. But they did not need the Trojan Horse to do so. Odysseus had already sneaked in and out of the city on two separate occasions shortly before. People came and went through the gates of Troy throughout the period of the war, making it all the easier now to trick the gatekeepers into letting in a handful of disguised Greek warriors.

Once inside the city, all the Greeks needed was arms, which a determined man would not have found difficult to get. Hardened commandos could easily have overpowered a few Trojan soldiers and taken their shields and spears.

Ancient cities under attack were also often betrayed from within. Not even weapons could stand up to “dissatisfaction and treachery,” says an Akkadian poem. Troy too no doubt had its share of people who preferred dealing with the Greeks to prolonging the misery of war.

But if the Trojan Horse was not strictly necessary to the Greek's plan, it might well nonetheless have been part of it. The Trojan Horse would certainly inspire more confidence if ancient history recorded another occasion on which a similar ruse was employed. But how could it? The Trojan Horse was such a famous trick that it could be used only once.

According to Homer, it was Odysseus who conceived of the idea and Epeius, known otherwise as the champion boxer at the funeral games of Patroclus, who built the Horse. Certainly, the Greeks had the technology to build it. Ancient fleets usually sailed with shipwrights because wooden ships constantly need repairs, and Linear B texts refer both to shipwrights and carpenters as professions. There would have been no shortage of men in the Greek camp to do the job.

And there would have been no question about whether a statue of an animal would catch the Trojan king's fancy. Bronze Age monarchs liked animal imagery. A Babylonian king of the 1300s
B.C.
, for example, had specifically asked the pharaoh for a gift of realistic figures of wild animals, with lifelike hides, made by Egyptian carpenters. But which animal should the Greeks build at Troy? A Trojan Dog would have been insulting; a Trojan Lion, frightening; a Trojan Bull or Cow would have thrown Greek cattle-raids in the enemy's teeth. But a horse symbolized war, privilege, piety, popularity, and Troy itself.

Horses are expensive, and in the Bronze Age they were usually used in military context, rarely as farm animals. Rulers of the era often sent horses as a gift between kings, while ordinary Trojans might cherish a figure of a horse. In the Late Bronze Age, horse figurines, made of baked clay, were collected throughout the Near East. Excavators recently found a clay model of a horse in Troy of the 1200s
B.C.
Finally, there was the religious connotation: as a votive offering, the Horse was all but an admission of Greek war guilt, a symbolic submission to the gods of the horse-taming Trojans.

The Horse would have been used to smuggle a small number of Greek soldiers into the city, but the chances of detection were very high. Although the traditional story of the Trojan Horse cannot be ruled out, it seems more probable that, if the Horse did exist, it was empty. There were simpler and less dangerous ways of smuggling soldiers into the city. The horse's main value to the Greeks was not as a transport but as a decoy, a low-tech ancestor of the phantom army under General Patton that the Allies used in 1944 to trick the Germans into expecting the D-day invasion in the area of Pas de Calais instead of Normandy.

Epic tradition has some Trojans accepting the Horse as a genuine sign that the Greeks had given up while others remain skeptical. The debate lasted all day, according to Vergil, or three days, according to Homer. The
Sack of Ilium
identifies three camps: those who wanted to burn the Horse, those who wanted to throw it down from the walls, and those who wanted to consecrate it to Athena. The length of the debate was in direct proportion to the stakes. The safety of the city as well as individual careers were hanging on the decision.

Vergil makes much of Priam's daughter Cassandra, an opponent of the Horse who enjoyed the gift of prophecy but suffered the curse of being ignored. This story does not appear in Homer or what we have of the Epic Cycle. One person who does feature in the tradition is the Trojan priest Laocöon, a staunch opponent of the Greeks who wanted to destroy the Horse. In Vergil, the debate over the Horse comes to an end when Laocöon and his sons are strangled by two snakes from the sea. The
Sack of Ilium
apparently places this event after the Horse had already been brought into town. Surely the snakes are symbolic; surely Laocöon and his boys were killed not by a sea-snake but by a member of the pro-Greek faction, and so, therefore, by someone perceived as a tool of a signifier of evil like a snake.

Laocöon's snakes may well be rooted in Anatolian Bronze Age religion, local lore of the Troad, or both. Hittite literature made the snake a symbol of chaos and the archenemy of the Storm God. It makes sense for a snake to foil the Storm God's servant, the Trojan priest who was trying to save his city. The Troad, meanwhile, is rich in fossil remains of Miocene animals such as mastodons and pygmy giraffes, and these objects might have made their way into myth. For example, an Iron Age Greek painter probably used a fossilized animal skull as a model for a monster whom Heracles is supposed to have defeated on the shore of Troy. So the story of Laocöon's murder by monsters from the sea may well have Trojan roots.