39 pages • 1 hour read
Barry StraussThe Trojan War: A New History
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Night of the Horse”
The Greeks hide on the nearby island of Tenedos, leaving only the famous Trojan Horse, and a spy, Sinon, behind. Inside the horse are nine Greek warriors. The Trojans fiercely debate what should be done with the horse, ultimately bringing it into the city. In the Aeneid, the Roman retelling of the story, Sinon pretends to be a deserter to gain access to Troy. Cassandra, who has the gift of prophecy, speaks against the horse but is ignored. Laocoon, a priest of Poseidon, is another opponent of the horse, but he is strangled by two sea snakes in Virgil’s Aeneid.
Aeneas fights while Troy burns, before carrying his elderly father, Anchises, out of the city on his back. The Sack of Ilium offers a more pragmatic version of the story, in which Aeneas escapes to the Dardania Valley. The casualties are numerous. Neoptolemus scores the most kills, with elderly king Priam among them. Meanwhile, Menelaus vengefully kills Helen’s new husband, Deiphobus. Menelaus finds Helen at home, and moves to kill her, but she seduces him, instead. Neoptolemus seizes Andromache and Agamemnon’s Cassandra. Priam’s daughter, Polyxena, is sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles, and Hector’s son, Astyanax, is thrown from the walls by Odysseus, so that Astyanax can’t seek vengeance in turn.
Chapter 11 Analysis
Nearly every scholar agrees that the Trojan Horse is a fiction. Since Roman times, theories about its real nature have ranged from a siege tower to an image of a horse on an unlocked door into the city. Assyrians named their siege towers after horses in the Bronze Age, so there may have been a germ of truth to the tale. Deceit was a fundamental part of Hittite military tactics. Even without the horse, the retreat to Tenedos may have been enough to catch the Trojans off guard and attack them by night. Similar tactics had been used in Carthage in 213 BCE, although this was admittedly around a millennium later. Tenedos was located seven miles from the Trojan Harbor, not much more than two hours from the city of Troy.
Yet the Trojan Horse may have existed. In the 1300s BCE, a Babylonian king asked the pharaoh for a gift of realistic figures of wild animals. Rulers of the period often sent horses as gifts, and clay horse figurines were collected in the Near East. Excavators even found a horse figurine in the Troy of 1200s BCE. Laocoon’s sea snakes are more likely to have signified a member of the pro-Greek faction. Snakes symbolize chaos in Hittite literature. Troy would have been forced to surrender, or be destroyed, like the warring Sumerian cities Lagash and Umma in 2500 BCE. Archaeology pinpoints a fire in Troy VIi (the name refers to an archaeological layer of Troy itself), between 1230 and 1180 BCE. Unburied and injured skeletons have been discovered in the burned remains.
