What is the Legend Behind the Trojan Horse?

            Every one has heard about the Trojan War. It was fought between the early Greeks and the people of troy now in turkey. The scene of this great battle was the city of troy in about 1230 B.C. the war lasted for 10 years.

Trojan Horse

            According to legend, the war started in about 1240 B.C. when Paris, prince of Troy fee in love with Helen, the beautiful wife of king Menelaus of Sparta and carried her off to Troy with him. Menelaus brother, the great king Agamemnon of Argos, summoned all the kings of the other Greek cities, and set off with a thousand ships to bring Helen back. For a number of years, the Greeks besieged Troy without success. Then they devised an ingenious scheme to defeat the enemy.

            They built a great wooden horse, which was called the Trojan horse. Epeius, a master carpenter and pugilist built the horse. The Greeks concealed a raiding party inside it and left it outside the city walls. The Greeks pretending to retreat sailed to the nearby island of tendons. They left behind Sinon, who persuaded the Trojans to believe that the horse was an offering to Athena to make troy impregnable. The Trojans brought the horse inside the city walls. What they did not know was that the horse was full of Greek soldiers. In the middle of the night, they came out of the horse, opened the cit gates and let in the rest of the Greek army inside the fort. They killed all the Trojans they could find, and set the city on fire. It was completely destroyed.

            The legend of the Trojan horse has been the subject of famous epic called ‘the lliad’ written by the blind Greek poet, homer. The story is told at length in the 2^nd book of Virgil’s Aeneid and is also touched upon in Homer’s Odyssey. No one knows if the story was true.