A Different Horse
A Different Horse
Alternate Interpretations of the Trojan War and the nature of the historical record
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The Trojan War and Trojan Horse stories are colorfully told in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and in Virgil’s The Aeneid. They are romantic tales of derring-do invoking images of gods and legendary heroes, all written long after the conflict—Homer’s 450 years after, Virgil, 1,200. Even so, they provide a lot of clues that add up to a plausible interpretation for the “events” of the seemingly fantastic story of the Trojan War and the Trojan Horse. For centuries, all three have been viewed as either literal truth (ridiculous to historians) or as a legend based on an ancient myth of a conflict that was indeed fought, although its details are severely lacking. There is evidence to support Homer’s and Virgil’s outlines of that war’s events, enough to warrant a fresh look at it, especially the climactic Trojan Horse story, to see if the legends may have something to tell us.
Homer speaks of seemingly random acts of the gods, and to the seemingly insatiable will of men to wage war.
The gods in these stories use men like toys, throw up smokescreens, change form, appear as different mortals, give false and cryptic information, and generally act like willful, bizarre humans. The difference is that these willful, bizarre actors can’t be killed, and they can turn almost anything into anything else. They act unpredictably, almost at whim, so that the slaughter goes on unabated, with neither one side nor the other favored. Divinities in Greek mythology never die, whereas death is always near at hand for mortals. The risk of destruction makes for heroes and becomes the ultimate test of courage. Creatures that can become whatever they wish, take any form, blast men and mountains into dust and still squabble like willful children over trifles and vanity are, in human terms, incapable of fear and, thus need no courage. This is Homer, a blind poet of whom we know practically nothing, explaining the causes of the random death and senseless violence of human warfare as the caprices of the gods.
History has not been kind to the Trojan War.
The descriptions classics’ descriptions are immediately suspect due to the fantasy nature of the caprices of gods, revelations viewed with disdain, distaste and distrust by arduously pragmatic military historians who know that their audience—mostly conservative military members—will assess the intervention of deities into the earthly affairs of man as quaint poetic license, well beyond verifiable experience, and including them in serious history is absurd.
Nonetheless, there are some salient facts to support the tales.
There was a city located approximately where, and when, Homer described it; that city was destroyed about 1180 BC, to include a great fire; well-respected military historians refer to the fall of Troy, one putting the year at 1184 BC. These are facts of archaeology and history, not the reading of a poem, so there must be some historic basis for Homer’s and Virgil’s epics.
The siege of Troy is sometimes considered the beginning of Greek history, even before they called themselves “Greeks.”
The war between the Danites (Greeks) and Troy started with the kidnapping (or elopement) of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, by Paris, a shepherd and the son of King Priam of Troy. As leaders of the budding Greek culture, Achilles and Agamemnon led an invasion force to Asia Minor and besieged Troy. These are the bare bones of the historical part of the story.
An historical Helen seems unlikely.
The legendary aspect—the part that most bothers historians—involves wagers by gods over who was the most beautiful woman and subsequent grudges held by the losers of the wager. Women as the cause of all trouble (and the inspiration for all men) is a common dramatic theme. Homer makes Helen the cause of the conflict, and only because she was so beautiful did the war take place. As for what really started the conflict, we can’t know for certain, but a kidnapping/elopement of someone as a trigger/final straw isn’t out of the question.
Why make Helen a goddess?
By using Helen, Homer made an immortal being mortal so that she could share in the human struggle with the most fearsome of monsters on Earth: Man’s savagery to his own species as expressed in war. Here, Helen is not only the cause of the conflict; she became at risk because of it. Her beauty, whether or not of her own making, has unleashed one of the longest sieges in history.
Or not.
The war between Troy and the Greek city/states may have lasted ten years, but the climactic siege of Troy almost certainly didn’t. Some scholars hold that the siege probably didn’t last more than a winter—six months at the very most—because of the labor requirements for the agriculture in spring, summer, and fall. Most of the proto-Greeks weren’t professional soldiers, but farmers and tradesmen. Others put it at six weeks, which seems short. Still, any siege after a Bronze Age war of spanning a decade would be wearing on everyone.
Troy of both history and legend held out long enough for other Asia Minor powers to enter the conflict, even if they couldn’t raise the siege.
Heroes fell on both sides: the Greeks lost Patroclus, and their combat leader Achilles, while Troy lost Paris and Hector, their champion. But, even worse, there seemed to have been no end to it. The Trojans penetrated the Greek palisade fortress briefly once, nearly destroying the Greek ships. The Greeks resorted to the Arrows of Hercules (probably an early javelin-throwing ballista, a big crossbow), but still could not win the war.
And it’s this impasse—an apparent deadlock with both sides seeming to wear out—that begins the tale of the Trojan Horse.
The Greek plan is to build a large wooden horse, within which would be secreted Odysseus and a few hand-picked men. As the Greeks sailed away and hid behind the island of Tenedos, the Trojans would haul the structure inside, the Greek commandos would be released, open the city gates, signal the waiting fleet, and the Greeks would sail back to take the city.
The idea for a horse filled with men comes from Odysseus.
Why a horse? Perhaps it was because Troy was famous for horse breeding before the war, and Hector had been a breaker (trainer) of horses by trade. And, the god Poseidon was worshipped in the shape of a horse. As depicted by Homer, Odysseus was a skilled negotiator and bold raider. In Virgil’s version, the horse was “tall as a hill,” and contained nine “captains” and at least two other men “fully armed.” The horse structure was so large that some of Troy’s long-standing walls had to be partly dismantled to get it inside. As to the horse’s size, various accounts have about a dozen men inside. The risk of the total loss of even low-level combat leaders in such an enterprise would have been great for the increasingly desperate Greeks.
There are some real problems with this part of tale.
A structure large enough to hold even a dozen fully-armed Greeks (at about ten square feet per man with spear and shield) would have been impossible to hide behind a palisade, so it could have come as no real surprise to the Trojans when they discovered it after the Greeks sailed away. The plan has too many “ifs” for historians. What would compel Troy to haul the monstrosity inside? Would the wheels on this huge structure be somewhat suspicious, or the thoughtfulness of a defeated foe? Land-built structures of that size (at least thirty feet tall and forty long) just didn’t move that much in Bronze Age technology. And if it could move, how could the Greeks be sure that Troy would even move it inside their beloved city walls, rather than just leave it in place for all the world to see? And how long would the Greeks have to sit quietly and wait in that horse until Troy made up its mind? Days? Weeks?
There are other problems as well.
There would have been a great risk of structural failure before, during or after movement, or the more realistic chance that the Trojans would just dismantle the large structure (which would require less manpower than dragging) to move it. But the poets think in more dramatic than practical terms, when the mist clears and a wooden horse full of Greek commandos is discovered in their former, now abandoned, camps. Virgil describes the Trojans coming out, throwing wide the gates to gape at the abandoned camps, to look in wonderment at the great tribute left behind. Would Troy really think it a tribute? Apparently not immediately, since some wanted to destroy it, which would have been a more appropriate response in the circumstances. The name of Odysseus was even invoked by Laocoon and his people. But then Sinon, an alleged deserter from the Greek forces, turns up with a story about how Odysseus wanted to maintain the siege long after it appeared to be hopeless, and how the Greeks had tried to leave but were blocked by bad weather. And how the oracle of Apollo told them to leave an offering, which was to be none other than Sinon.
Troy buys Sinon’s story.
But then, just before Laocoon sacrifices a bull, then serpents come to destroy him. This affirms to Troy that, since the snakes coiled up at the feet of Athena when they were done, the horse was sacred (Laocoon having profaned it by throwing a spear at it) and needed to be hauled inside. Thus resolved, Troy proceeds to do exactly that, even to the point of tearing down part of the city walls to haul the great horse inside.
And, of course, Cassandra.
Even while this is happening, Cassandra foretells the future fall of Troy, and noises are heard coming from inside the great structure. Here again, the fickle gods wreak their havoc, cursing Troy against believing the truth when they heard it. But Troy is joyous that this symbol of the end of the conflict, was now being brought in as proof of their great victory. Troy, after a decade of war and a long siege, needs desperately to believe that this is a fitting tribute from a vanquished foe. Laocoon seems to be a dramatic device, and Sinon adds only a little credibility to the meaning of the horse. Given this, Laocoon’s death was almost certainly added to provide narrative suspense.
It may also be a clue to the mystery of the Trojan Horse story.
Allegory and symbolism aside, sieges are hard work for both sides, and ancient sieges were particularly arduous. Disease and starvation are endemic to all participants, even during modern sieges. This raises possible explanations for the horse story that the ancient poets would likely have escaped the ancient poets’ notice.
Disease and the weakening effects of long-term short rations.
Sanitation and nutrition were only dimly understood in the 11th Century BC, and the Greeks had been in roughly the same place for a whiles. If Helen’s face really did launch a thousand ships, with roughly fifty men per ship that would mean that at least 50,000 Greeks (and probably more) had been encamped beneath Troy’s walls. This is a huge army to supply remotely, even today, and it needs an enormous number of latrines and gallons of fresh water, both of which would have been in short supply. Troy would have suffered greatly in a siege and protracted conflict, but so would Greece, with so many workers absent. Fresh food acquisition and waste disposal has always been a problem in sieges, and in ancient sieges was often decisive.
Desperation and disease had to have been prevalent in Priam’s city.
Disease may have been encoded in the horse saga, but another clue may have been left us in the death of Laocoon by apparent suffocation. It is unlikely that healthy, awake adults would stand still long enough to be crushed by non-mythical constricting snakes, of which none are indigenous to Asia Minor. The snakes Virgil describes may instead have been neurotoxic venomous asps or cobras (except perhaps for their apparent size). However, given the horse story and the likelihood that the Greeks would have left horses behind, there are least two other explanations:
Pulmonary anthrax and pneumonic plague.
Both diseases suffocate their victims in fluid or hemorrhagic blood, and are two that cross the species barrier between horses and men. These diseases can strike a weakened individual so swiftly that medical help, even if available and competent, is often useless.
Poseidon: God of earthquakes.
Another theory reasons that the god Poseidon is the originator of earthquakes, and Homer has Athena call him “earthshaker” in The Odyssey. If a disease is partly responsible for the weakening of Troy’s defenses, a tremor could have caused the partial destruction of the city’s walls and perhaps part of the city itself. This explanation is a little too convenient for historians, but it comfortably fits into the pieces of the legend.
Let’s be rid of gods and put the pieces together.
First, the siege. A long war then a lengthy siege weakens both Greeks and Trojans to a point where neither could see a reasonable or honorable end to the conflict. An outbreak of a highly contagious disease, possibly one that infects both men and animals, causes the Greeks to take to their ships to escape what the medicine of their time would call “bad humors.” While not completely abandoning the siege, they sail just over the horizon or, more likely, just around Tenedos, like the poets said.
Then, the plagues.
The Trojans, out foraging for food or on an expeditionary raid, find that the Greeks have abandoned their contaminated camps, and proceed to bring the bring in abandoned livestock, including horses, into the city. While doing this, some Trojans feel the beasts to be cursed or diseased. But starving Troy slaughters what the Greeks leave behind and quickly consumes it, infecting themselves with the same diseases that the Greeks fled. Weakened by years of war and a long siege, the Trojans begin to sicken and die in large numbers. While mass cremations raise the stench of death and burning flesh to the offshore breezes, a small earthquake destroys part of the city wall. Troy, weakened by starvation, disease, a few collapsed buildings and fires compounded by simple exhaustion, cannot immediately repair the damage.
And opportunity strikes.
A Greek ship, captained by Odysseus, looks in on Troy as a matter of routine. They smell the death from the funeral pyres and see the damaged wall, observing that no one appears to be trying to repair it. Odysseus signals the fleet and the Greeks return, opportunistically taking the city and sacking it.
Prove me wrong.
Virgil’s and Homer’s tales of the Trojan War may have been what Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was to World War Two—tales of a randomly-generated, endless tragedy of seemingly mindless death regulated by creatures immune to the killing itself. To Homer, the capricious, immortal gods were responsible for the slaughter. For Virgil, the inevitable destiny of the Roman Republic that the survivors of Troy would found drove the war (Rome was founded by refugees from the Trojan War). For Heller, bureaucrats a thousand miles away from the battlefront dictated the fate of the hapless victims with bizarre rules about sanity and mission counts, dooming men to flying endless missions to no apparent purpose in a backwater of a global war.
They had their reasons, just as modern storytellers have theirs.
In describing the events of a conflict that took place millennia before their time, both Homer and Virgil may have been preserving an oral tradition that at least made history entertaining enough to retain the main story in the first place. This should not be seen as unusual, for the two writers often used common dramatic devices for different purposes (Homer’s underworld is for heroes to watch the world go by and to get Odysseus to go home: Virgil’s points to Rome’s destiny).
A choice to make.
But here the historian is faced with a dilemma: If a Trojan War was completely mythological, then what about all the fragmentary evidence we have supporting its occurrence? If a Trojan War did happen, then some (small) parts of the mythical description may be true, and some part, or some other interpretation, of the Trojan Horse story has to be thought to be accurate, if figurative.
Historians and their fans make this choice all the time.
History is replete with legends that are made “facts by repetition,” because they fit either desired imagery or they just sound good. Long speeches and dialogues from the ancient world to the present are taken as facts when there is absolutely nothing to back them up. Thousands of events that “everyone knows” had to have happened probably didn’t because there’s no evidence for them. Troy and the Trojan Horse may have just been one more dimly-remembered set of facts turned into unrecognizable legend. But, just imagine if, someday in the distant future, Catch-22 is the only record of World War II…
The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas
Just as a historian might view the Trojan Horse story with different interpretations of sources, The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas also depends on how the sources are seen, and how the viewer wants to see them.
A girl’s in trouble and her friend wants to help. But there’s also some simple facts that could be seen…differently…that could change everything. His help changes both their lives, as it does everyone around them. But the truth…? Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
War of 1812 Reconsidered
Six Ways to Rewrite History, Part II
And Finally...
On 8 June:
793: Danish Norse sack the monastery on Lindisfarne Island, England. This was the first recorded Víkingr attack on England. (The word viking is a verb meaning “to raid” in old Norse. Víkingr is the noun meaning “raider’). It sent shock waves through Europe not because they were unaware of the Norse, but because of the ruthless and murderous way the attack was carried out. It marked the beginning of 300-plus years of Norse invasions and occupations of the British Isles and western Europe.
1949: George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is published by Secker and Warburg, London, England. It was Orwell’s ninth and last book published during his lifetime, and has been far and away the best selling and best known. In 2013, a first edition sold for $10,000, which may have been more than the author ever received for any book while he lived.
And 8 June is BEST FRIENDS DAY. This is the one day of the year you should get ahold of that one person in your life without whom your life would be a good deal darker. But remember: a friend will help you move; a buddy will help you move a body.