The lookout who climbed the wall in the morning shouted, and the sea was empty. Not one of the ships that had filled it for ten years was there.
People threw the gates open and poured out. In the abandoned camp there were cold hearths and the marks of tent pegs, and nothing else. And in the middle of the shore stood a horse made of wood.
It was bigger than a house, and nobody had ever seen anything that size. People walked around it looking up.
The Tenth Year
The war was in its tenth year, ten years since a thousand Greek ships dropped anchor in front of this city. In that time a good many famous fighters had died.
The walls of Troy had not come down, and only then was it clear that they could not be opened by force. In the Greek camp Odysseus put forward another way.
Epeius, who was good with his hands, began cutting timber, and the work was to build a horse that was hollow inside. In its flank he set a door that could not be seen from outside.
At night picked soldiers went in through it, while the rest launched the ships and hid behind a nearby island. In the morning the sea looked empty.
The Man Left on the Shore
While people were examining the horse, a soldier was brought in under guard, his hands tied and his clothes torn. He was a Greek named Sinon.
He wept as he spoke. “I was abandoned. They meant to offer me up, so I ran.” The people gathered round him.
“That horse is an offering to the goddess Athena. They built it large on purpose, so that you could not bring it inside your walls. They were told that if it goes inside, this city will never fall.”
That touched exactly the place people were tender in, and after ten years they already wanted to believe the enemy had gone. A lie is usually laid exactly where the listener was hoping to find one.
The Spear of Laocoon
Laocoon, a priest of Poseidon, pushed through the crowd. “Do you really not know what this is? I fear the Greeks. I fear them even when they are bearing gifts.”
He raised his spear and threw it hard into the flank of the horse, and the spear went in and there was a sound. It was a hollow ring.
At that moment two serpents came up out of the sea and went straight for Laocoon and his two sons. In front of everybody the three of them were gone.
People read it this way. “He threw a spear at a thing belonging to the goddess and he was punished for it.” Once the man who gave the warning looked punished, the warning itself was rubbed out.
Pulling Down Their Own Wall
From a tower Cassandra called out. “Bring that in and this city is gone by tonight.” Nobody turned round.
Cassandra could see what was coming, but she carried with it a curse that nobody would believe her. The more right she was, the more they laughed.
The horse was bigger than the gate, so people put ropes on it and laid down rollers. And they pulled down a section of their own wall.
A wall that had held for ten years came down that day from the inside, and children threw flowers and followed along behind it. The horse was set up in the middle of the city.
That Night
The night grew late and the city went quiet, and people worn out with celebrating fell asleep. Sinon carried a lamp up onto the wall and signalled towards the island.
When the door in the flank opened and a rope ladder came down, one by one they stepped onto the ground. They opened the gates from the inside.
The hidden ships had come back in the dark, and when the gates opened, ten years ended in one night. In the morning there was no Troy.
Today, the Way They Won
Ten years of fighting ended with one day of cunning, and a gate that could not be opened by force was opened from within. It is why the books on war put winning without fighting first of all.
But the story does not end there, and that night the Greek army trampled its way into the temples. Athena saw it and scattered them on their sea roads.
Odysseus wandered ten more years before he reached home, and the commander in chief got back alive and was killed in his own house. How you won decides what is left after the winning as well.