"Was The Trojan Horse Real?" Inside The Historical Debate: By Bernadette Giacomazzo| Erik Hawkins.

"Was The Trojan Horse Real?" Inside The Historical Debate: By Bernadette Giacomazzo| Erik Hawkins.

According to ancient mythology, the Trojan Horse allowed the Greeks to capture the city of Troy, but historians differ on whether this famous wooden beast was actually real or not.

According to ancient Greek history, the Trojan horse allowed the war-weary Greeks to enter the city of Troy and finally win the Trojan war. Legend has it that the horse was built at the behest of Odysseus, who hid inside its structure along with several other soldiers to ultimately lay siege to the city. So epic was its construction — and its purpose — that it was forever immortalized in classical works.

But did it even exist? In recent years, historians have questioned whether the over-the-top display of Grecian military might was little more than a myth, constructed to make the Greek army seem more like a godly force and less like the mere mortals that they were. 

Other classists suggest that the Greek army did indeed use some type of siege engine — like a battering ram — and have described the Trojan horse’s existence as more metaphorical than anything else.

Regardless of whether the Trojan horse truly existed, its place in history cannot be denied.

The Trojan Horse in the Aeneid:

There’s only one mention of the Trojan horse in antiquity, and that’s in the Aeneid by Virgil, a Roman poet from the Augustan era, who wrote the epic poem in 29 B.C. In Virgil’s telling of the tale, a Greek soldier by the name of Sinon convinced the Trojans that he’d been left behind by his troops and that the Greeks had gone home. 

But his soldiers had left behind a horse, he said, as a dedication to the Greek god Athena. Sinon claimed that his troops were hoping to curry favor with the goddess after the Trojans laid waste to her land.

But the Trojan priest Laocoön quickly realized something was wrong. According to the Aeneid, he’d tried to warn his fellow Trojans about the impending danger. But it was too late — “the horse had entered Troy,” and the myth of the Trojan horse was born.

The term “Trojan horse” is still used today.

In modern parlance, it refers to subversion from the inside — a spy who infiltrates an organization, for example, and subsequently turns the organization’s very existence on its head.

More recently, however, a “Trojan horse” — more commonly referred to as merely a trojan — is used to refer to computer malware that misleads users about its true intent. When a trojan takes over your computer, it leaves it vulnerable to other “invaders” — viruses that could compromise your personal information and leave you vulnerable to hacking and other offenses.