Legends Summarized: The Trojan War

Summary

The video script narrates the epic tale of the Trojan War, focusing on the Iliad's exploration of Achilles' wrath and its catastrophic consequences. It delves into the war's origins, including Helen's disputed parentage and the oath sworn by her suitors. The script also covers the pivotal events leading to war, such as the Judgement of Paris and the abduction of Helen, and the war's progression, featuring Achilles' refusal to fight and the eventual Trojan Horse strategy. The summary concludes with a reflection on the war's aftermath and the ironic fate of its key figures.

Takeaways

• 😠 The Iliad, an epic poem by Homer, begins with the word 'wrath' and focuses on the destructive power of fury, particularly the wrath of Achilles.
• 🎭 The Iliad is a small part of a larger narrative, capturing only the final days of the ten-year Trojan War.
• 👑 Helen of Troy, considered the most beautiful woman, is a central figure whose abduction by Paris sparks the Trojan War.
• 🌀 The story of Helen's birth is inconsistent, with some versions suggesting she is the daughter of Zeus, while others claim she's the child of Nemesis.
• 🤝 To prevent war over Helen's hand in marriage, the suitors swear an oath to protect her chosen husband, an idea proposed by Odysseus.
• 🍎 The Judgement of Paris, where he awards the apple to Aphrodite, sets off a chain of events leading to the Trojan War, as the goddess promises him Helen.
• 🚢 The Trojan Horse, a ruse devised by the Greeks, leads to the sack of Troy and the end of the war, as warriors hide inside and are let out by Sinon at night.
• 🏺 The Iliad's narrative is rich with dramatic irony and emotional stakes, making it a compelling tale despite its tragic nature.
• 🛡 Achilles' decision to join the war is voluntary and driven by the pursuit of eternal glory, as foretold by his mother Thetis.
• ⚔ The death of Achilles is inconsistently described across sources, with some attributing it to Apollo, Paris, or a combination of both, often with divine assistance.

Q & A

What is the main theme of the Iliad?

The main theme of the Iliad is wrath, particularly focusing on the wrath of Achilles, which leads to numerous deaths and significant consequences during the Trojan War.

Why is the first word of the Iliad significant?

The first word of the Iliad, 'μῆνιν' (menin), meaning wrath, is significant because it sets the tone for the entire epic, emphasizing the destructive power of fury and the central theme of the poem.

What is the relationship between Helen of Troy and the Dioscuri?

In the Iliad and Odyssey, Helen of Troy is the daughter of the Spartan king Tyndareus and his wife Leda, making her the sister of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux.

How does the story of Helen's birth vary across different versions?

The story of Helen's birth varies with some versions suggesting she was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, born from an egg after Zeus took the form of a swan. Other versions, like the Cypria, suggest she was the child of Nemesis and adopted by Leda.

What was the oath sworn by Helen's suitors and what was its purpose?

The oath sworn by Helen's suitors was a binding promise to protect the winner of Helen's hand in marriage against any interference, ensuring that none of the suitors would attempt to steal her away, thus preventing a war among them.

Who is Paris in the context of the Trojan War and what role does he play?

Paris is a Trojan prince who, after being promised Helen as his wife by Aphrodite, sails to Sparta to abduct her, sparking the Trojan War as he takes her back to Troy.

What is the significance of the 'Apple of Discord' in the story?

The 'Apple of Discord' is a golden apple thrown by Eris, the goddess of strife, inscribed with 'for the fairest', which leads to a beauty contest among the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and ultimately contributes to the events leading up to the Trojan War.

Why does Achilles initially refuse to fight in the Trojan War as depicted in the Iliad?

Achilles initially refuses to fight because Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces, dishonors him by taking away his slave woman Briseis, which is seen as a personal insult and a sign of disrespect.

How does Patroclus's death influence Achilles's actions in the Iliad?

Patroclus's death deeply affects Achilles, prompting him to rejoin the battle out of grief and rage, leading to a significant shift in the tide of the war as he kills Hector, the Trojan hero.

What is the Trojan Horse and how does it play a role in the fall of Troy?

The Trojan Horse is a large wooden horse constructed by the Greeks with soldiers hidden inside. It is presented as a peace offering, but when the Trojans bring it into the city, the Greeks inside open the gates for the rest of their forces, leading to the sack of Troy.

What are some of the different fates of Achilles as described in various sources after the Trojan War?

Different sources attribute Achilles's death to various causes, such as being shot by Apollo, Paris guided by Apollo, or Paris with the help of Poseidon. However, all agree that he dies in Troy, fulfilling his mother's prophecy.

Outlines

00:00

📜 Introduction to the Iliad and Helen of Troy

The script begins with an introduction to the Iliad, an epic poem that delves into the wrath of Achilles, and its profound impact on the Achaeans during the Trojan War. It highlights the poem's focus on the destructive nature of anger and the dramatic irony that pervades the story. The narrative then expands to discuss the larger context of the Trojan War, starting with the birth of Helen, whose parentage is a subject of debate across various sources. The paragraph explores different versions of Helen's origins, including her semi-divine status as a child of Zeus and her disputed lineage in the lost epic, the Cypria. It also touches upon the artistic and mythological significance of her birth story, which involved Zeus in the form of a swan.

05:01

🏰 The Marriage of Helen and the Prelude to War

This section delves into the events leading up to the Trojan War, focusing on Helen's marriage and the oath sworn by her suitors. It describes how Helen's hand in marriage was a point of contention among Greek kings, leading to a clever solution proposed by Odysseus. This solution involved a binding oath to protect the chosen suitor's marriage, which was sworn by all, including Menelaus, who was ultimately chosen by Tyndareus. The paragraph also details the divine intervention that set the stage for the war, including the judgment of Paris and the apple of discord thrown by Eris, which led to Paris choosing Aphrodite's offer of Helen as his wife. The narrative concludes with the abduction of Helen and the mustering of Greek forces to retrieve her, setting the stage for the Trojan War.

10:01

🔥 The Trojan War and Its Aftermath

The final paragraph covers the events of the Trojan War, the Iliad, and the aftermath, as recounted in various ancient texts. It discusses the roles of key figures like Achilles, who chose glory over a long life, and Odysseus, who reluctantly joined the war. The narrative includes the conflict over Chryseis and Briseis, which led to Achilles' withdrawal from battle, and the eventual return of Achilles to avenge Patroclus' death. The paragraph also covers the death of Achilles, the Trojan Horse ruse, and the fall of Troy. It concludes with a reflection on the ironic outcome that the war, which caused so much suffering, was indirectly triggered by Odysseus' earlier actions.

Keywords

💡Wrath

Wrath refers to intense anger or indignation, often leading to destructive actions. In the context of the video, it is the central theme of the Iliad, focusing on the wrath of Achilles, which sets the stage for the epic's tragic events. The video script begins with the word 'wrath' to emphasize its significance in driving the narrative of the Trojan War.

💡Iliad

The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer, recounting the events of the Trojan War. It is a cornerstone of Western literature and focuses on the wrath of Achilles and its consequences. The video uses the Iliad as a starting point to explore the broader story of the Trojan War, highlighting its dramatic irony and emotional stakes.

💡Trojan War

The Trojan War is a legendary conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, which serves as the backdrop for the Iliad and other ancient Greek literature. The video script uses the Trojan War to frame the discussion of various mythological events and characters, such as the judgment of Paris and the fall of Troy.

💡Helen of Troy

Helen of Troy, also known as Helen, is a central figure in the Trojan War mythos, renowned for her beauty. The video script discusses her parentage and the events leading to her marriage, which are key in triggering the war. Helen's abduction by Paris is the catalyst for the conflict, illustrating the power of personal desires and their far-reaching consequences.

💡Odysseus

Odysseus is a legendary Greek hero, king of Ithaca, and a prominent figure in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the video, Odysseus is depicted as a cunning strategist who helps Tyndareus solve the problem of Helen's suitors by suggesting they swear an oath, which later binds them to fight in the Trojan War.

💡Achilles

Achilles is a Greek hero and the central character of the Iliad, known for his exceptional combat skills and his role in the Trojan War. The video script describes Achilles' choice between a long, obscure life or a short, glorious one, highlighting the theme of heroism and the pursuit of immortal fame.

💡Agamemnon

Agamemnon is the king of Mycenae and the brother of Menelaus, who leads the Greek forces in the Trojan War. The video script mentions Agamemnon's role in the war, including his decision to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to appease the gods and gain favorable winds for the Greek fleet.

💡Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse is a pivotal event in the Trojan War, where the Greeks deceive the Trojans by hiding soldiers inside a giant wooden horse, leading to the fall of Troy. The video script uses the Trojan Horse as a symbol of cunning and the ultimate victory of the Greeks, marking the end of the war.

💡Ajax

Ajax is a Greek hero and a prominent warrior in the Trojan War, known for his strength and courage. The video script briefly mentions Ajax's death after losing to Odysseus in the funeral games for Achilles's armor, showcasing the tragic fates that can befall even the greatest heroes.

💡Penthesilia

Penthesilia is an Amazon queen and a warrior in the Trojan War, as described in the video script. Her arrival in Troy and subsequent death at the hands of Achilles add a layer of complexity to the war narrative, introducing themes of gender, honor, and the tragic consequences of war.

Highlights

The Iliad begins with the word 'wrath', setting the tone for the epic's exploration of fury and its consequences.

The Iliad is a compact yet rich narrative within the larger context of the Trojan War, offering dramatic irony and high emotional stakes.

Helen of Troy's birth is a pivotal moment, with her parentage varying across myths and impacting the course of the Trojan War.

The marriage of Helen and the oath sworn by her suitors to protect her marriage is a key precursor to the war.

The Judgment of Paris, where he awards the apple to Aphrodite, sets off a chain of events leading to the Trojan War.

The abduction of Helen by Paris triggers the mustering of Greek armies, bound by their oath to defend her marriage.

Achilles' decision to join the war is driven by the pursuit of glory rather than obligation, as he was not one of Helen's suitors.

Odysseus' reluctance to join the war and his attempt to feign madness to avoid it adds a personal dimension to the narrative.

The sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon to appease Artemis is a tragic moment that propels the Greek fleet towards Troy.

The Trojan War's duration and the siege of Troy are summarized, highlighting the destructive impact on the region.

Achilles' withdrawal from battle after the loss of Briseis and his subsequent return after Patroclus' death are central to the Iliad's plot.

The death of Hector by Achilles and the latter's subsequent grief are pivotal moments that shift the war's tide.

The Posthomerica and other sources provide varying accounts of Achilles' death, adding to the myth's complexity.

The Trojan Horse, a ruse devised by the Greeks, leads to the fall of Troy and the war's conclusion.

The Nostoi, though fragmentary, is suggested to detail the Greek heroes' returns home after the war, adding to the epic's aftermath.

The irony of Odysseus' prolonged struggles, both in the war and his subsequent journey home, is a poignant reflection on the war's causes and consequences.

Transcripts

Wrath.

Sing, o goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’s son Achilles, murderous, doomed, who cost

the Achaeans countless lives, hurling down to the house of Hades so many sturdy souls.

So begins the Iliad, quite possibly the most famous epic poem in the world.

It’s a song, a tragedy and a treatise on the destructive power of fury.

It’s no accident that the first word is “μῆνιν” [menin], wrath.

The Iliad is the story of wrath - of achilles, of the gods, of me at myself for making it

the first big project I illustrated on this channel and thus by consequence the worst

video I’ve ever made that hurts me to think about even though it was a valuable experience

without which the channel wouldn’t exist as it is now - it’s a very emotionally loaded

text, basically.

And there’s a reason it’s so well-liked - it’s genuinely an incredibly good story.

Barring a few boat lists  it’s a masterfully-crafted 

ride, absolutely loaded up with dramatic irony

and emotional stakes.

But it’s also just a thin slice of a much larger story.

The Iliad takes place in the final days of the ten-year Trojan War, but the Trojan War

is a much bigger beast than just what Homer retold.

So today let’s pull together a big pile of sources and talk about the bigger picture.

The placement of dominos that’ll eventually topple into the Trojan War begins with the

birth of Helen of Troy - previously just Helen.

This is also one of the pieces of the story that has the least consistency across different

versions, since practically speaking all that matters is that she exists, not the specifics

of where she comes from.

In the Iliad and Odyssey, Helen is the daughter of the Spartan king Tyndareus and his wife

Leda, and her brothers are Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri - a pair of badass horse-ridin’

twins and the subject of the constellation Gemini.

This is corroborated in Pseudo-Apollodorus’s bibliotheca with the additional detail that

Leda’s children are the result of a wild 

night where she slept with  both Zeus and Tyndareus,

with Zeus in the form of a swan - a concept that was bizarrely popular with renaissance

artists and perverts of all stripes.

This biological nightmare produced four children, with Pollux and Helen the semi-divine children

of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra - Agamemnon’s future wife and axe-murderer - as the fully

mortal children of Tyndareus.

Helen’s parentage continues to be disputed in the lost epic the Cypria, where it’s

suggested that Helen was adopted by Leda but was actually the child of Nemesis, the greek

goddess of divine retribution for hubris.

Now that kinda reframes the whole thing, doesn’t it?

Some of these stories also state that Helen hatched from an egg on account of the whole

“zeus was a swan at the time” thing, and in Pausanias’s descriptions of greece he

describes a temple that contains shards of the eggshell that Leda supposedly laid.

Look, I let a lotta this stuff slide, but that’s weird, right?

Anyway, skipping ahead a couple decades, the next domino is the marriage of Helen.

Helen is, according to some sources, the most beautiful woman in the world, and is thus

unsurprisingly a very desirable bride, and a whole bunch of Greek kings roll up in Sparta

to try and claim her hand.

The exact roster varies a lot depending on who’s telling it, but you better believe

those storytellers loved them some tedious lists.

Anyway, specifics aside, Tyndareus is pretty worried about having this many big personalities

competing for his daughter out on his front lawn, and he’s extra worried that picking

one of ‘em might make things exponentially worse and trigger a full-on war when the rest

of the suitors get cranky about being snubbed.

This is when one of the suitors sidles up to him - a young man by the name of Odysseus

- and he offers to help Tyndareus resolve his little suitor problem if he helps him

with something else, by putting in a good word for him with the Spartan king Icarius

so Odysseus can woo his daughter Penelope.

Tyndareus agrees, and Odysseus suggests that Tyndareus make all the suitors swear a binding

oath to protect the winner’s marriage against any kind of interference, so that none of

them can try to grab Helen and run off without the rest of them declaring war.

The suitors agree to the oath and Tyndareus ends up choosing Menelaus for Helen - represented

in absentia by Agamemnon, who must’ve been on his absolute best behavior to make that

kind of a good impression - and the rest of the suitors pack up and go home, though not

before Tyndareus keeps his word and arranges for Penelope and Odysseus to get together.

In Euripides’s Hecuba the format of the oath is the same, with the minor change that

Tyndareus lets Helen choose her own husband, and she chooses Menelaus.

Very egalitarian!

But meanwhile, somewhere completely different, the gods are setting up a domino of their

own.

According to Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, Eris, goddess of “it’s gettin’ a little

too chummy around here” wakes up one morning and chooses violence, lobbing an apple at

Athena, Aphrodite and Hera and saying it’s a prize for whichever one of them is the most

beautiful.

The Roman author Hyginus adds a little more detail in his text Fabulae by specifying that

this is happening at the wedding of Achilles’s parents, and Eris is pissed she didn’t get

an invite.

Zeus recognizes disaster when he sees it and quickly has Hermes tow the goddesses somewhere

very far away to work things out, so he takes them to Mount Ida where Trojan prince Paris

is hanging out.

Paris has had an eventful childhood of his own at this point - in Hyginus’s Fabulae

again it’s briefly mentioned that Paris’s mother Hecuba had a dream where she gave birth

to a burning torch that exploded into snakes, and everyone agreed that was a bad omen and

a half, so when the baby was born they handed him off to a servant to kill him.

The servants choose the much more humane option of dumping him on a mountain to die, but luckily

he’s rescued by some shepherds who take him in.

A few years and several shenanigans later Paris reclaims his status as prince and everyone

accepts him back with open arms, because it’s probably fine, right?

It’d be crazy if this random kid  was singlehandedly responsible 

for triggering the downfall of troy.

Anyway, that’s been Paris’s life so far, and meanwhile back in the present, Hermes

tells him to pick which goddess gets the apple.

Each goddess offers Paris an incentive to vote for her - Hera promises to make him king

of the world, Athena offers him glory and victory in battle, and Aphrodite promises

him Helen as his wife.

Paris chooses Aphrodite and sails off to Sparta to collect his already-married prize while

Hera and Athena start plotting revenge.

In the Cypria the story continues, with Paris and company first hosted by the Dioscuri and

then by Menelaus and Helen.

When Menelaus has to leave for Crete, Aphrodite intervenes to get Helen and Paris together

and they load up Paris’s ships with stolen treasure and sail off into the night.

Despite a storm sent by a pissed-off Hera, potentially due to her role as the goddess

of marriage, Paris and Helen make it to Troy and are married.

However, this story isn’t quite universal - in Euripides’s play Helen, the Helen that

Paris brings to Troy and marries is actually an illusion crafted and brought to life by

Hera, while the real Helen is brought to egypt to keep her safe during the war.

Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca also mentions this version, so it must’ve been decently

well-known.

Anyway, the questionably consensual abduction of Helen kicks off the next big step in the

process - namely the mustering of armies.

See, all of Helen’s former suitors are still bound to that oath to defend her marriage,

so pretty much every important Greek king is now honor-bound to go storm the gates of

Troy and get Helen back.

In the Cypria, Menelaus is informed of Helen’s loss by the goddess Iris and returns home

to get Agamemnon to start mustering an army.

They go collect the various Greek kings who are honor-bound to side with them - and also

Achilles, who, unlike the rest of them, doesn’t actually have to be there, since he was too

young/too not-even-born-yet to be one Helen’s suitors, so he’s not bound by the oath.

It’s referenced briefly in the Iliad that Achilles’s mother Thetis prophesied that

if he went to troy he’d definitely die there, but his name would be remembered forever,

but if he stayed out of it he’d live a very long life but die in obscurity.

He chose to join the greek kings and storm troy for the immortality of glory, not because

he had to be there.

In contrast, Odysseus DOES have to be there, but really, really doesn’t WANT to be there.

In the years since the marriage of Helen he and Penelope have gotten married and had a

baby son, so now he has a lot to lose.

In order to escape his own oath he pretends to have gone mad, but gives it up when Agamemnon

threatens his son.

Because Agamemnon's a real piece of shit.

Who knew?

The gang reluctantly muster at Aulis and prepare to sail for Troy, but then Agamemnon pisses

off Artemis for no reason and she sets the wind against them.

Euripides’s tragic play Iphigenia in Aulis recounts this part of the timeline - the only

way to appease Artemis is for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, which he

feels briefly bad about and then does almost immediately.

However, in the Cypria, Artemis actually spirits Iphigenia away and makes her immortal, replacing

her on the altar with a deer, which is nice of her.

With Artemis appeased the wind turns and the fleet can officially sail for Troy.

The surviving summaries of the Cypria explain in brief what happens when they arrive at

Troy: a few minor skirmishes happen, the Achaeans send a message to Troy demanding the return

of Helen and the stolen treasure, Troy tells ‘em to get stuffed and the war begins.

Achilles pretty much singlehandedly sacks the surrounding towns and the Achaeans besiege

Troy.

This part of the process evidently takes about nine years, but it’s nine years of ferocious

ass-kicking that basically destroys every part of Troy that’s not safely behind the

walls.

Zeus decides to give the Trojans a break and works out a plan to take Achilles out of the

equation for a little while… and that’s how we get the Iliad.

To very quickly speed through it, during the raiding around Troy, most of the Achaeans

picked up “bride-prizes” - which was a nice way of saying “enslaved trojan women

for them to bone.”

Achilles’s bride-prize is  Briseis, a character with 

basically no character who, surprisingly,

does seem to get along okay with Achilles and Patroclus - she’s very upset when Patroclus

dies, spoiler alert, and mentions that he promised to make Achilles marry her when they

returned from Troy - while  Agamemnon’s bride-prize is 

Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, a Trojan

priest of Apollo.

Chryses tries to buy his daughter’s freedom with a kingly ransom, but Agamemnon tells

Chryses he’s gonna enjoy making sure Chryseis is too busy boning him and making him sandwiches

to ever see her homeland again.

Chryses prays to Apollo for help and Apollo deems Agamemnon a Huge Dickweasel and rains

divine arrows down on the Achaeans, killing a whole bunch of ‘em.

The Achaeans figure out Agamemnon pissed off Apollo by dishonoring his priest and the only

way to make him stop killing everyone is to give back Chryseis, which Agamemnon refuses

to do unless he’s given a replacement slave woman right now, because obviously that's SO much  

more important than winning the actual war he's  there to win. So he takes Briseis from Achilles.

This royally antagonizes Achilles, so he bundles up into his sulky blanket burrito and hides

in his tent while the Achaeans get absolutely slaughtered without him.

With Achilles off the field, the Trojan hero Hector has nobody to counterbalance him, so

the Trojans actually start winning for a change.

Long story short, that’s  basically how things continue 

until Patroclus is killed by Hector and Achilles’s

grief and rage finally motivate him to rejoin the battle - at which point he pretty much

immediately kills Hector and completely turns the tide of the war.

And that’s basically the Iliad, minus a couple metal gear jokes.

The events after the Iliad are recounted in 

a few places - one of them  being Quintus Smyrnaeus’s

Posthomerica, which covers the death of Achilles and the final days of the Trojan War.

It also features an ass-kicking Amazon princess, Penthesilia, daughter of Ares, who rolls up

to Troy pursued by the furies for accidentally killing her sister and decides to sublimate

her many, many issues by slaughtering as many Achaeans as she can get her hands on, which

she does so effectively it briefly sparks an honest-to-god feminist revolution in the

trojan women.

Achilles isn’t there to stop her because he’s too busy crying on top of Patroclus’s

grave, but when he catches wind of the slaughter he gears up, heads to the battlefield - and

kills her in one hit.

But this doesn’t improve his mood, as when he removes her helmet he finds Penthesilia

stunningly beautiful and immediately regrets killing her, instead imagining the life they

could’ve shared if they’d met under literally any other circumstances.

The Achaean warrior Thersites pops up to make 

fun of him for being a lame  girl-liking weenie-pants

and Achilles smacks him so hard he dies.

Weird chapter.

Anyway, later on we get the death of Achilles - which is unfortunately very inconsistent

across its many sources.

The post-homerica, for instance, credits his death to Apollo himself, who violates Zeus’s

dubiously-enforced no-interference policy and shoots Achilles in the heel with a poisoned

arrow.

In Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, meanwhile, Achilles is shot in the heel by Paris being

guided by Apollo, and in Ovid’s metamorphoses Paris shoots Achilles with Apollo’s help,

but they’re being motivated by Poseidon, who’s pissed as hell that Achilles killed

one of his sons earlier in the war.

In the Iliad, Hector prophesies that Achilles will be killed by Paris with Apollo’s help,

so that’s probably the most generally consistent version - but ultimately the how doesn’t

matter so much, all that matters is Achilles dies in Troy, just like his mother prophesied.

It's also interesting to note that  none of these versions specify that  

Achilles's heel is his only weakness  or that he's indestructible everywhere  

else. And while that's a fun bit of folklore,  it seems to have popped up after Homer and  

isn't really part of the original Trojan  cycle. But it's still cool, so. Y'know.

Fun fact, according to Sophocles’s play Ajax this is also where Ajax dies after he

loses to Odysseus at the funeral games for Achilles’s armor and kills himself from

shame.

Fun!

The posthomerica also explains how Paris dies - embarrassingly.

He’s shot by Philoctetes with two poisoned arrows, one of which hits him in the dick,

which I think we can all agree is the true villain of this story.

Paris tries to get his wife Oenone, a nymph, to heal him, but she’s pretty livid he abandoned

her for Helen and refuses, so he dies, and Priam is too busy mourning Hector to notice.

I’d feel bad for the guy, but……

I don't.

Anyway, with almost all of the major players dead, the war winds down, culminating in the

final domino - the Trojan Horse.

This part of the story is recounted in detail in both the Odyssey and the Aeneid, though

the Aeneid goes into a little more detail - with Athena’s help, the Greeks build a

massive wooden horse and several of them hide inside while the rest burn their camp and

sail away to make the trojans think they’re retreating.

The trojans are overjoyed that the siege is apparently over and swarm out of the city

and into the abandoned camp, finding it empty except for this giant wooden horse.

There’s a lot of debate over what to do with it, and one dude, Laocoon, a seer and

priest of Apollo, is actually appropriately worried about this seemingly spontaneous retreat,

yelling that they should REALLY know Odysseus’s tricks by now.

He even hucks a spear into the side of the horse to make his point.

The trojans also find and capture one remaining Achaean - a dude named Sinon, who spins a

very compelling sob story about being left behind as a sacrifice parallelling Iphigenia

to allow the rest of the Achaeans to sail home.

The horse, he explains, was built to win back favor from Athena, who was furious at Odysseus

and Diomedes for stealing her sacred statue, the Palladium, from Troy.

Sinon warns the trojans that because the horse 

is very definitely sacred  to Athena they absolutely

cannot destroy it or damage it in any way, but if they take it into the city it might

bring them the same good fortune that the Palladium used to.

And to really sell the bit, the gods send a bunch of snakes to kill Laocoon and his

sons.

Thoroughly convinced that damaging the horse is a very bad idea, the trojans lug it into

the city - over Cassandra’s protests, naturally - and that night Sinon unlocks the horse and

releases the warriors within, who swarm out and sack troy, burning it to the ground.

The version in the Odyssey is very similar, but it’s recounted from Menelaus’s perspective

inside the horse and he adds that Helen was suspicious of the horse and went around the

outside knocking on it, addressing the achaeans by name while impersonating the voices of

their wives, which is pretty devious - Odysseus just barely managed to keep the others from

blowing their cover through basic logic and the occasional application of CQC.

The horse plan works, the Achaeans successfully sack troy, and it’s a happy ending for everyone!

Kind of.

Really it’s a happy ending for almost no-one.

Between the Iliad and the Odyssey there’s one more lost epic called the Nostoi, a text

so fragmentary we only have five and a half lines from it.

Oh, it hurts.

Anyway the Nostoi seems to have told the story of the various surviving Greek heroes returning

home from Troy, minus our boys Odysseus and Aeneas, of course, who get their own elaborate

epilogues later on.

This is an important intermediate bit most of the later stories technically serve as

sequels to - for instance, Aeschylus’s Oresteia follows after Agamemnon returning home, and

in the Odyssey Telemachus visits Menelaus after he made it home with Helen, a story

that’s partially recounted in Euripides’s play Helen.

But at this point the Trojan War is basically fully wrapped up - 99% of everyone is dead,

Troy’s been burned to the ground, Agamemnon’s about to get murdered and all is finally right

with the world.

You know, I bet when Odyseuss was stuck out in Troy fighting for ten long years, and then

when he was lost at sea for another ten years - he probably really appreciated the irony

that the whole thing was technically his fault.

[Lorde - Team]