50 Fun Facts About Trojan Horse

Which famous ancient epic ends with the Trojan War still raging, before the wooden horse is built?

The Iliad stops with Troy still standing and the war unfinished. The horse turns up only in passing in the Odyssey, and at full length in a Latin epic written centuries later.

Which Roman poet gives the fullest surviving account of the Trojan Horse?

Virgil gave the tale to the losing side. In Book 2 of his epic a Trojan refugee relives the night at a royal banquet, and that Latin version became the one everyone knows.

Which Greek hero was the chief architect of the horse plan, and hid inside it himself?

Odysseus had tried to dodge the war by pretending to be mad, yet it was his trick that finally ended it, and he climbed in to lead the ambush himself.

Ancient accounts say the timber for the wooden horse was felled on which mountain overlooking Troy?

Mount Ida. The carpenter, Epeius, was a champion boxer who admitted he was no great fighter, yet his woodwork did what the army's heroes could not.

The wooden horse ended a siege of Troy that had dragged on for how long?

Ten years of fighting had failed to breach the walls. The horse, on one ancient poet's telling, took just three days to build.

What did the Greeks pretend to do after leaving the horse outside Troy?

Sail away for home is what the Trojans were meant to think. The fleet went no farther than the far side of a nearby island and came back the next night.

Behind which island did the Greek fleet hide while the horse did its work?

Tenedos lies within sight of the Trojan shore: far enough to look like a departure, close enough for the fleet to slip back in a single night.

Which Greek stayed behind to convince the Trojans the horse was a harmless offering?

Sinon let himself be caught, hands bound, and wept his way through a tale of Greek cruelty. The Trojans pitied him, untied him and asked him what the horse was for.

The Greek left behind with the horse told the Trojans it was an offering to which goddess?

Athena, he said, had turned against the Greeks after two of them stole her sacred image, the Palladium, from her Trojan temple, and the horse was built to win her back.

Why, according to the Greeks' cover story, was the horse built so enormous?

To keep it out of Troy: the spy claimed that if the horse ever stood inside the walls, the goddess's favor would pass to the Trojans. So they dragged it in.

In the Aeneid, the Greek left with the horse claims his own army meant to do what to him?

Sacrifice him: an oracle, he says, demanded a Greek life in return for fair winds, and he broke free and hid all night in a marsh.

In the Greek accounts, how did the spy inside Troy call the hidden fleet back that night?

He lit a beacon fire. In the Aeneid the signal runs the other way: the flagship shows a flame, and only then does the spy unbolt the horse.

In the Aeneid, what does the priest Laocoön hurl into the horse's side to back up his warning?

A spear. It stuck quivering in the planks and the hollow belly rang and groaned, a sound that the poem says would have saved Troy had anyone listened.

The saying 'Beware of Greeks bearing gifts' comes from a Latin line beginning with which words?

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, 'I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts', is a Trojan priest's shout as his countrymen crowd round the horse. They ignored him.

How does Laocoön die in the Aeneid?

Strangled by sea serpents, along with his two sons, in the middle of a sacrifice. The Trojans took it for a judgment on him and hauled the horse inside.

In the lost epic Sack of Troy, how did one band of Trojans respond to the omen of Laocoön's death?

Withdrew to the hills: Aeneas and his followers took fright and left before the Greeks struck, which is how Rome's legendary ancestor survived the night.

Which Trojan princess warned that the horse would be the city's downfall, and was ignored?

Cassandra saw the truth and was dismissed as usual. She outlived the sack only to be carried off as a war prize by the Greek commander and murdered with him by his wife.

Which god had given the Trojan prophetess her gift before cursing it?

Apollo, in the usual story, taught her prophecy in return for a promise of love. When she went back on it he let her keep the gift and made sure nobody would believe a word.

Homer says Helen circled the horse and tried to lure the Greeks out by doing what?

Mimicking their wives' voices, she called to the hidden chiefs by name. One was about to answer when his captain clamped a hand over his mouth and held it there until she had gone.

Why does Achilles, the Greeks' greatest warrior, play no part in the wooden horse in the ancient stories?

He was already dead, shot down by Paris with a god's help before the horse was thought of. In the Odyssey his ghost has to be told how the ambush went.

In the Odyssey, who sings of the wooden horse at the Phaeacian court, moving an unnamed guest to tears?

The bard Demodocus is blind, and sings the tale at the stranger's own request. The stranger's tears give him away, and he finally tells his hosts who he is.

In the Aeneid, how do the hidden warriors get down from the horse when the moment comes?

They slide down a rope. Another ancient account adds a casualty: the first man out jumped instead, and the fall killed him.

Which of these Greek leaders do ancient writers name among the men hidden inside the horse?

Menelaus had the most personal stake: his wife, Helen, was inside the walls. That night he went straight for the house of her new Trojan husband and killed him.

In the Aeneid, the story of the wooden horse is told over dinner to which queen?

Dido of Carthage asks her shipwrecked Trojan guest for the whole story. By the time he has finished she is falling in love with him, and his leaving destroys her.

In one lost Greek epic, how did the Trojans get the horse into their city?

Tore down part of their wall, with their own hands: the Trojans opened the breach that a whole Greek army had failed to make.

In the Odyssey, some Trojans want to hack the horse open, and others want to do what?

Hurl it off a cliff, after dragging it up to the heights. A third party wanted it left standing as an offering to the gods, and won the argument.

Which captured Trojan seer told the Greeks what they must do before Troy could fall?

Helenus was ambushed and captured by the Greeks, and he revealed the oracles that protected the city. In one account he had left Troy in anger by then, passed over for Helen's hand.

In one story Pausanias tells, a god's title 'Carneus' recalls which trees, felled in his grove to build the horse?

Cornel trees, 'craneia' in Greek. The story goes that the god was angry at the felling, so the Greeks appeased him with sacrifices and named him Carneus after the trees.

Some ancient and modern writers think the 'horse' was really what?

A siege engine, such as a battering ram. One ancient travel writer said everyone knew the horse was a device for breaching the wall, unless they took the Trojans for utter fools.

One modern theory treats the horse as a metaphor for which natural disaster breaching Troy's walls?

Poseidon was god of horses as well as of earthquakes, and Troy VI shows heavy quake damage.

One of the oldest pictures of the Trojan Horse decorates a giant clay jar found by a villager on which Greek island?

Mykonos, where a local man digging on his own land found the jar in pieces. Made in the seventh century BC, it shows the sack of Troy as a slaughter of women and children.

On a Greek jar of the seventh century BC, what does the horse have along its side?

Portholes are the artist's own liberty: no hiding place would have windows, but they let the viewer see the warriors waiting inside.

In the Aeneid, the ghost of which slain Trojan hero appears in a dream that night to say the city is lost?

Hector, still torn and bloodied from being dragged behind a chariot, tells the dreamer that Troy is falling and that he must take its sacred things and run.

Which pope bought the Laocoön statue weeks after its 1506 discovery?

Julius II bought it from the owner of the vineyard where it was dug up and set it in a Vatican courtyard, where it became the centerpiece of the papal sculpture collection.

Which Renaissance artist was sent to see the Laocoön statue as soon as it was dug out of a Roman vineyard?

Michelangelo was at the house of the pope's architect when word came, and went along. The architect's young son rode with them and wrote the eyewitness account sixty years later.

Where was the Laocoön statue displayed between 1800 and 1815?

The Louvre in Paris showed it as war booty: French troops carted it out of Rome under a peace treaty, and it went home only after Waterloo.

In computing, a 'trojan horse' is malware that does what?

Disguises itself as a normal program: like the wooden horse, it gets in only because the victim brings it in. Unlike a virus or a worm, it generally doesn't copy itself from machine to machine.

Which businessman-turned-archaeologist began digging at Hisarlik in the 1870s, convinced it was Homer's Troy?

Heinrich Schliemann had made a fortune in business before he took up archaeology. He cut a great trench straight down through the mound, sure that Homer's city lay at the bottom.

A German police spyware 'trojan' exposed by hackers in 2011 was nicknamed after which Star Wars character?

R2D2 came from a string of characters buried in its code. Hackers of the Chaos Computer Club exposed the spyware and showed it could do far more than the wiretapping courts had allowed.

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur's knights try the Trojan Horse trick with a giant wooden what?

A rabbit. The French defenders wheel it into their castle, and only then do the knights realize that nobody climbed inside; it comes flying back over the wall at them.

What did the Greeks set on fire to make their trick with the wooden horse more convincing?

Their own camp. With the huts in ashes, the Trojans threw open the gates and wandered out to see where the enemy had lived.

Trojan brand condoms first appeared in packaging that showed nothing but which image?

A helmet, chosen to suggest protection and virility. The plain look also suited wary pharmacists, and by 2006 the brand had about 70 percent of American drugstore condom sales.

The ruins widely accepted as ancient Troy lie in which modern country?

Turkey. Troy was the city the Greeks sailed across the Aegean to attack; its mound, Hisarlik, guards the mouth of the Dardanelles, the strait between Europe and Asia.

What were most Trojans doing when the Greeks finally crept out of the horse?

Sleeping off a victory feast. Sure the war was over, the city had spent the day in sacrifice and celebration, and the Aeneid calls it 'buried in sleep and wine'.

In which Euripides play does Poseidon describe a horse built 'to bear within its womb an armed host'?

Trojan Women opens the morning after the sack, with the sea god looking over the smoking ruins. The rest follows the city's queen and princesses as they are handed out to the victors.

Which king of Troy was killed at an altar on the night the horse was opened?

Priam had ruled Troy through the whole war. The old king took refuge at an altar in his palace as the city burned, and a Greek warrior cut him down there.

A generation before the wooden horse, which hero sacked Troy after a Trojan king cheated him of promised horses?

Heracles had saved the king's daughter from a monster and was refused his fee, so he came back with warriors and took the city. A young prince he left alive was ruling Troy when the wooden horse came.

Proverbially, how many ships did the Greeks launch against Troy before a wooden horse finished the job?

One thousand, as in 'the face that launched a thousand ships', Marlowe's line about Helen. The Aeneid makes the same count, with Trojans lamenting that a trick did what the whole fleet could not.

After Troy fell, Helen went home to which Greek city, where the Odyssey shows her as queen again?

Sparta. In the Odyssey she presides over a palace dinner there, slips a grief-numbing drug into the wine and tells how she once kept the secret of a Greek hero spying inside Troy.

A 2010s theory links the tale to Phoenician merchant ships that Greeks called 'hippos' because of what?

An equine head as decoration, carved at the prow, earned these cargo ships the nickname. On this theory the 'horse' at Troy was a ship, and later storytellers took the word literally.