I just finished watching one of those spectacle-filled 1950s Cinemascope epics called Helen of Troy. It was great, if not quite accurate all the time. But whatever; it really was fun and peopled by a literal “cast of thousands”! The recent American Hollywood movie Troy was mostly done by CGI. This one had a real guy in a real costume carrying a real spear and sword in every panoramic army crowd scene. It’s funny I’d never heard of it before.
So this whole experience of watching the Trojan Horse in action reminded me about the scholarly debate surrounding the Trojan Horse. Apparently, from what I understood from my college classes, most historians, classicists, etc., think that the Trojan Horse is a myth: a literary device created for some didactic purpose. Not me! I think the Trojan Horse was real, and that it really happened the way it says it did in The Odyssey and The Aeneid.
So, why would I believe that the Trojan Horse was an actual historical tactic and event? It’s really simple, which is why all these professorial types don’t think of it. They’re so busy steeped in nit-pickety stuff that the big picture almost always eludes them. (That’s why peer-reviews of papers and studies are so important!) I think you only have to ask this: “Who is telling this story?” It’s the Greeks’ tale, right? (Yes, it’s more detailed in Virgil’s tale, but it’s also mentioned in Homer! And Virgil wasn’t for another thousand years, so let’s deal with Homer, shall we?) This isn't the Trojans’ excuse for why they lost the war, it's the Greeks’ explanation of how they won! It may be a myth, but it’s told as a historical account of a war won by Greece, told to Greeks by a Greek. So, why would it be un-Greek to tell the tale of the Trojan Horse? Think about it, and think about what it says in The Iliad and The Odyssey.
The Iliad says that the Greeks sailed all the way to Troy and had to live there for ten years, winning only the occasional battle or challenge combat. (Or was that Virgil? I’m sorry, but I don’t remember as well as I used to. I’ve read them all, but it’s been a while, so I’m not sure I remember them as well as I should. Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of movies about it, so I’m sure that’s better than any book could tell it, right? In any case, the one thing I’ve learned from Stephen Colbert is to never let the facts get in the way of a good argument!) They were basically defeated, so they resorted to what at the time could only have been thought of as a dishonorable trick: the Trojan Horse. As far as we know historically, nothing like this had ever happened before in warfare.* So ask yourself this: if you were getting your butts kicked and were sitting around spinning your wheels for ten years, and then you had to play a dirty trick to win, would you celebrate it in your mythological retelling of the story? I wouldn’t! (And look at the way Homer mentions it in passing in The Odyssey, like he’s got a knife to his throat not to say too much about it!) I’d make all the guys seem like super-macho wall-smashing conquerors to inspire all the contemporary warriors to want to be like them, not make it look like they had to fall back on a scam. (And look at how other countries tell their own tales; even when they lose wars, they’re almost never anything like this!)
Truly, the Trojan Horse was a great trick to win an unwinnable stalemate war for the Greeks. But honestly, I think they wouldn’t have told it like that unless they had to. It just makes them look like losers, and then sore losers, right? They played a trick on the Trojans, and then they just killed everyone in their sleep. Is that the message you’d want to send about your country’s history? I doubt it! That’s why I think it’s true.
The only explanation I can think of for why, if the Trojan Horse was not historically true, the Greeks ever would have allowed it to be told as a historical account of their nation’s behavior in wartime is this: Homer was blind. Maybe they felt bad about beating him up since he was disabled, so they let him get away with singing anything he wanted about them, no matter how bad it made them look. Probably Odysseus tripped him in the street by accident one day, and so Homer made him look like the most incompetent sailor and navigator of all time as a form of payback. And after that, plus how wimpy they’d look beating up a blind man, perhaps the Greeks simply agreed to let him sing whatever he wanted. I guess we’ll never know. But still, the Trojan Horse seems more likely to be true history to me, when I really think about it.
* I’m assuming that “we” haven’t read that much military history. Hell, they could have made it all up anyway, and we’d never know the difference, right? That’s what I say!
