The Wooden Horse That Ended A Ten-Year War

According to the calculations of the Greek scholar Eratosthenes, on the night of 24 April 1184 BC the city of Troy fell — not to an army but to a wooden horse, because the Greeks had spent ten years and thousands of lives trying to break through walls they could not breach by force, and then they built a giant hollow horse from timber sacred to the god Apollo, carved an inscription on it saying it was an offering to Athena, left it outside the gates, and sailed away, and two people warned the Trojans not to bring it inside — the priest Laocoön said it was a trick, and the princess Cassandra said it would destroy them — and the Trojans dragged it through the gates anyway and celebrated all night, and at midnight when the city was drunk and sleeping the men inside opened the horse from within, opened the gates for the fleet that had sailed back in the dark, and killed everyone they found, and the city that had held for ten years fell before dawn.

Interesting Fact: Cassandra’s curse was that she could see the future but no one would ever believe her. She had warned that Paris bringing Helen to Troy would destroy the city. She warned about the horse. She was right every time and ignored every time. After Troy fell she was dragged from the temple of Athena and assaulted by the Greek warrior Ajax the Lesser — inside the sacred temple, in front of the goddess’s statue. The Greeks were so horrified by this sacrilege that they asked the gods to punish Ajax on the voyage home. His ship was wrecked. He swam to a rock and boasted that he had survived despite the gods’ wishes. Poseidon split the rock beneath him and he drowned. The city of Troy burned for days. Archaeological evidence at Hisarlık in modern Turkey shows a catastrophic fire at exactly the period Eratosthenes calculated.

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