Is the Trojan Horse in the Iliad? What Homer Tells

The short answer is no: the Trojan horse is not in the Iliad. Anyone who opens the poem expecting the most famous scene of the Trojan War will not find it, and this is neither a flaw in the work nor a gap left by time. It is a deliberate choice by Homer, and understanding why he made it is the best gateway into the poem.

What the Iliad does not tell

The Nous lecture on the Iliad opens with this list. The poem does not tell the story of the Trojan War as a whole, it does not tell of the abduction of Helen, it does not tell of the wooden horse offered by the Greeks, it does not tell of the death of Achilles, nor does it mention Achilles’ heel. What it covers is solely the final weeks of the war’s final year.

This clears up a common misunderstanding. Many people imagine the Iliad as a complete account of the conflict, from its start to the burning of the city. It is something else entirely: the poem begins with the word mênis, wrath, and deals with the anger of a warrior, Achilles, and what that anger costs. It ends with the funeral of Hector, before Troy falls. The fall takes place after the final line.

Why Homer left it out

In the Poetics, Aristotle praises precisely this choice: Homer appears divine compared to other poets because he did not attempt to narrate the entire history of the Trojan War. A poem carrying the abduction, the siege, the death of Achilles, and the horse would be a chronicle. A poem that chooses the wrath of one man and traces its consequences is a work of unified art.

There is also the audience. Those who listened to the Iliad in antiquity already knew the story of Troy. What held their attention was not discovering how the war ended, but experiencing how those events unfolded. For this reason, Homer himself anticipates what is to come, and the absence of the horse frustrated no one: the audience carried it in their memory.

Where the horse actually appears

The wooden horse is found in other works. In the Odyssey, also by Homer, the episode is sung by the bard Demodocus at the Phaeacian court (Book VIII), and Odysseus returns to it when recounting what he knows of the dead in Book XI. It is there, and not in the Iliad, that Homer touches on the idea of the horse, and always in passing.

The scene as we usually picture it, the gift left before the gates and brought inside the walls, comes later: it appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, in Book II, when Aeneas recounts the fall of the city. It was Virgil, centuries later, who turned the horse into the symbol we know today. Anyone reading the three works in sequence will see the story of the Trojan War distributed across different poems, each with its own perspective.

How this changes your reading

Knowing that the horse is not there shifts the expectations with which one opens the book, and for the better. The Iliad is not an account of Greek victory, it is a meditation on anger, on the worth of a life, and on the grief that extinguishes hatred. It ends, in fact, with the enemy being laid to rest. Those looking for the cunning of the horse will find, in its place, the tent where Priam kisses the hands of Achilles.

To follow the poem in sequence, start with the summary of the Iliad, by Homer. And to see how the poem concludes without the fall of Troy, read How the Iliad Ends.

Continue: The Iliad, by Homer: Summary and Analysis · How the Iliad Ends · The Wrath of Achilles: Why the Iliad Begins with Anger · Free will in Macbeth: destiny or choice?
Source class: Ilíada, de Homero