Posthomerica, Book 12 — The Building of the Wooden Horse

Reading Troy — chapter 36 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 12

Posthomerica, Book 12 — The Building of the Wooden Horse (Days after the captains' council in Book 11; the twelfth of the post-Iliadic books; the Greek camp, the Trojan plain, the timber of Mount Ida)

Dawn. Odysseus speaks his plan at the captains' tent. The army cannot take the walls; the gods will not give the city by storm; the city must be taken by a thing the Trojans will themselves carry inside. He names what he has been thinking through on the beach at midnight. A great hollow horse of wood, large enough to hold a picked company of armed men, built as if it were a votive offering to Athena. The army will burn the camp, launch the ships, sail behind the island of Tenedos at sunset, and return at night to a beach the Trojans believe abandoned. A single man — Sinon — will stay behind with a story. The horse will go through the gates by its own bulk; the city's own hands will draw it in.

The captains argue. Diomedes is sceptical; Neoptolemus wants a frontal assault; the Atridae weigh both. Athena herself sends an omen — a hawk taking a small bird in front of the tent — and the omen settles them. Epeius is sent for: the boxer of Book 4 who has been the camp's master-carpenter since the games. Quintus pauses on his name; the man who lost no contests in Book 4 except boxing is the man whose hands will end the war. Epeius prays to Athena. He goes up to Mount Ida with a working-party. They cut "the tall pines and the smooth oaks" — the same pines that supplied Achilles's pyre in Book 3, the same oaks the Trojans cut for Hector's. Quintus marks the parallel.

The building takes seven days. Quintus catalogues the materials and the craft as if the horse were a temple offering. Bronze nails of the Cyclopian sort, the kind Hephaestus uses; cypress for the legs; pine for the belly; oak for the body. The horse stands four times the height of a tall man. Its ribs are jointed; its belly is a chamber with a removable plank in the right flank for the men to enter and exit; its eyes are inset with carved ivory; its mane is real horse-hair from the immortal Xanthus and Balius — Quintus's quietest sacrilege, the bow of Heracles paralleled by the horse of Achilles. On the seventh day the horse is finished. Epeius weeps with relief and exhaustion. Athena descends invisibly and "puts strength into the work."

The picked company is chosen. Quintus gives the catalogue: Neoptolemus first (the spear of Chiron with him), Odysseus second (the architect), Diomedes, Menelaus (with his sword drawn already because he is going for Helen), Sthenelus, Thoas, Acamas, Demophoon, Anticlus, Eumelus, Idomeneus, Meriones, Philoctetes (with the bow), Podalirius (the physician), Calchas (no, Calchas stays — Quintus is silent on the seer's absence and the silence is meaningful), Epeius himself (the maker; tradition requires him), and a few more — Quintus lists thirty in all. They sit in the belly. Sinon is briefed; he will let himself be captured, claim to be a refugee from Odysseus's wrath, and tell the Trojans the horse is a votive offering whose destruction will bring Athena's curse but whose acceptance will bring her favour.

The camp is fired at sunset. The Greeks launch ships. The fleet bears away around Tenedos and lies in the lee of the island. The smoke of the burned camp rises from the empty beach. The horse stands alone on the sand at dawn, with Sinon hidden in the reeds beyond. From the walls of Troy the watchmen see no Greeks. The gates are unbarred for the first time in ten years. The Trojans come down to the beach.

The book closes with the city's debate around the horse. Laocoön, priest of Poseidon, comes forward with his sons and casts a spear into the wood; the spear sticks; he cries the cycle's most famous warning ("I fear the Greeks even bringing gifts" — Quintus has it; Virgil canonises it). Two great sea-serpents come up out of the surf and crush him and his sons before the city. The Trojans take the omen the wrong way. They open the gates and drag the horse inside on rollers. Cassandra cries out from the temple; she is shut up again. Sinon is found, brought before Priam, tells his story; he is believed. The horse stands in the great square of Troy. The book closes at sunset with the Trojans feasting in the streets, the gates closed for the night against an enemy that is no longer outside the walls.

Analysis

The cycle's most famous machine

The Wooden Horse is the single object most people associate with the Trojan War, and it does not appear in the Iliad at all. The Iliad's frame closes at Hector's funeral; the Iliad's heroes never get inside the city. The horse belongs to the Cypria and the Little Iliad and the Sack of Ilium, and is summarised in passing at Odyssey 4.271-289 (Helen telling the story at Sparta) and Odyssey 8.500-520 (Demodocus singing it at Alcinous's court) and Odyssey 11.523-532 (Odysseus telling Achilles's shade in the underworld). Virgil's Aeneid 2 gives us the great surviving long version from the Trojan side. Quintus's Book 12 is the only fully extant ancient Greek long version. The poem's structural function is total: this is the book where the cycle delivers its definitional event. Everything since the Iliad's end has been the long approach to this object.

Epeius the carpenter-boxer

Epeius is the cycle's quiet hero. Quintus has been planting him since Book 4, where he won the boxing-match at Achilles's funeral games and was named carpenter-of-the-camp. The detail comes from older tradition — Stesichorus's Sack of Ilium, the Little Iliad, and a long lyric in honour of Epeius's craft — and Quintus inherits it as the cycle's most elegant character-economy. The man who builds the horse is not Odysseus (the planner) and not any of the Iliadic captains; he is a journeyman boxer whose hands are usable. Epeius's prayer to Athena before he begins is the book's most touching small scene — a craftsman asking the goddess of craft for the skill to do his job. The Posthomerica is at its best when it remembers that an army is built of all its men, not only its champions.

Athena present and absent

Athena is the book's hidden agent. She sends the hawk-and-bird omen that decides the captains; she gives Epeius the strength to complete the work; she will guide the horse into Troy in spirit. She is also the goddess whose Palladium the Greeks have already (in Book 10's offstage events) stolen from her own temple in the citadel — Diomedes and Odysseus's joint theft, mentioned in the Little Iliad. The horse is built as a votive to her precisely because the votive-pretense works on Trojan piety: the city believes Athena demands the offering and that destruction of it will bring her curse. Quintus's irony is dense. The goddess who has been protecting the Greeks all along is used as the false reason for the trick that finishes the war.

Laocoön and Cassandra: the two unbelieved

The book gives us the cycle's most concentrated double scene of true seeing rejected. Laocoön, priest of Poseidon, throws his spear into the horse and warns the city in plain words. Two serpents come up from the sea — sent by Athena to silence him, in Quintus's version; sent by Apollo or Poseidon, in other traditions; the question of which god is at fault remains theologically open across antiquity. They crush him and his sons in front of the gates. Cassandra, just released from the temple, cries her parallel warning. Neither is heard; Laocoön's death is taken as a sign that he was wrong to throw the spear (the gods punished him for sacrilege against the votive); Cassandra is shut up again as habitually deranged. The cycle's two clearest sights are both registered as their opposites. This is the Posthomerica's most concentrated treatment of its great theme: prophecy without belief is no prophecy at all. The horse goes in because the city has trained itself, over a long siege, to refuse warnings.

Virgil and Quintus on the same scene

The Laocoön sequence is the place where the Posthomerica and the Aeneid most directly converge. Aeneid 2.40-227 gives us the version that came down through Virgil to all of European art (Vatican Laocoön statue, El Greco, Tiepolo, etc.). Quintus and Virgil were probably both drawing on the lost Sack of Ilium of Arctinus and the Little Iliad; their versions agree on the serpents, the death, the misreading of the omen, and the entry of the horse. They diverge on emphasis. Virgil makes Laocoön's death the centrepiece of Aeneas's narrative to Dido; Quintus folds it into a longer narrative of the whole horse-stratagem with Laocoön as one scene among several. The famous tag — "I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts" — appears in both, in different formulations; the line is older than either poet. Reading the two side by side is one of the great experiences of the cycle.

Sinon, the actor

Sinon is the cycle's least heroic figure and one of its most necessary. He is a Greek soldier who agrees to be captured and to lie. He is briefed by Odysseus, performs convincingly before Priam, and delivers a story polished enough to swing the Trojan decision. Quintus is sparing on his characterisation; Virgil's Aeneid 2 gives us the great long version of his deceit-speech. Quintus seems to assume the reader knows the type. The point is structural: the horse alone cannot get into the city; a man with a story has to convince the city to want to bring it in. The Posthomerica's last act runs on persuasion as much as on woodwork.

Way's wooden-horse passage

A.S. Way's translation of the building-passage is one of the book's set-pieces. His blank verse takes the slow accumulation of materials and craft — bronze nails, cypress legs, pine belly, oak ribs, ivory eyes, real horse-hair mane — and renders it as a kind of liturgy. The Greek beneath is detailed but not lyric; Way makes it lyric. The translator is on his familiar ground here: ceremony rather than action. The catalogue of the picked company in the horse-belly is also rendered as quasi-liturgical, with each name given its small place. The reader feels Quintus's care for the company that will end the war.

What to watch for

• Book 13 is the sack itself — the horse-company opens the gates at midnight; the city burns; Priam dies; Astyanax dies; Cassandra is dragged; Helen is reclaimed.
• Aeneid 2 will give us the long Trojan version of the same night, from inside.
• Odyssey 4 and 8 will give us shorter Greek versions of the horse, with Helen as both saviour and traitor of the company inside.
• Sinon survives the sack and goes home; Laocoön and his sons are the cycle's last named pre-sack dead.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The horse is the cycle's longest backward echo, because the Iliad does not contain it. The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral and stops; everything from Achilles's death forward (Penthesilea, Memnon, the corpse-fight, the funeral games, the judgement of the arms, Ajax's suicide, Eurypylus, Neoptolemus, Philoctetes, Paris, and now the horse) is the cycle's filling of the Iliad-to-Aeneid gap. The oaks and pines cut on Ida for the horse rhyme with the pines and oaks cut on Ida for Achilles's pyre in Posthomerica 3 and for Hector's pyre in Iliad 24 — Ida is the cycle's wood-source for funeral and ruin both, and Quintus's catalogue of materials here is a deliberate verbal echo. Epeius the carpenter was introduced in Posthomerica 4 as the boxer at the funeral games; the cycle's quietest character-economy pays off here, eight books later. Athena's hawk-and-bird omen replays the cycle's many bird-omens (the eagle in Iliad 12, the snake in Iliad 2). The Palladium-theft mentioned in passing (Diomedes and Odysseus's pre-horse infiltration of the citadel) is older than the Iliad and is one of the lost cycle's set-pieces. Cassandra's renewed warning answers her speech of Book 11; Laocoön's appearance answers no earlier Posthomerica book directly (he is unique to this scene in the tradition) but his role as Poseidon's priest links to Poseidon's many earlier appearances (the funeral games of Achilles, the deification of Achilles on Leuke). Helen on the walls in mourning, last seen in Book 10 after Paris's death, will reappear in Book 13 at Menelaus's reclamation.

Forward echoes

Book 13 is the immediate sequel: the company opens the gates at midnight, the city burns, Priam dies at the altar by Pyrrhus's hand, Astyanax is thrown from the wall, Cassandra is dragged from the temple, Helen is reclaimed. The horse is the engine of all of it. Aeneid 2.13-249 will give us the long version of this same night from the Trojan side, with Sinon's deception narrated in extensive direct speech and Laocoön's death framed as the great undoing of the city; Virgil's account is the canonical Western version and is in dialogue with Quintus's even where the two poets are drawing on the same lost sources (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium). Odyssey 4.271-289 will have Helen tell the horse-story to Telemachus at Sparta, in a strange version where she walked around the horse imitating the voices of the wives of the men inside trying to lure them to speak — a story that paints her as the company's danger, contradicting the Odyssey 11 and 8 versions where she helps them. Odyssey 8.500-520 will have Demodocus sing of the horse at Alcinous's court while Odysseus weeps. Odyssey 11.523-532 will have Odysseus tell Achilles's shade in the underworld that Neoptolemus was the bravest inside the horse, holding still while others wept. The horse becomes the cycle's most-narrated event: the same wood, six surviving long retellings, every retelling slightly different, each one a small mirror of its narrator's relationship to the war. Aeneas's centre-position in Book 11 here pays off too: he and his family are in the city, and the night will mark him out as the one Trojan to come through.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — speaks the plan; chooses the picked company; sits inside the horse
• Neoptolemus — first into the horse with the spear of Chiron; the cycle's spear-point
• Philoctetes — in the horse with Heracles's bow
• Diomedes — in the horse; sceptical at first but persuaded
• Menelaus — in the horse with his sword drawn; going for Helen
• Agamemnon — presides over the council; stays with the fleet at Tenedos
• Athena — sends the omen; gives Epeius strength; arranges Laocoön's silencing
• Priam — presides over the Trojan debate; receives Sinon; orders the gates opened
• Cassandra — cries the warning at the horse's entry; shut up again

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — long dead; his son leads the company that finishes the war
• Hector — long dead; the oaks for the horse come from the same Ida-grove as the oaks of his pyre
• Helen — in the city; the night will bring Menelaus back to her chamber
• Hecuba — in the palace; the night will take her last sons
• Andromache — in the palace with Astyanax; the night will take her son
• Astyanax — Hector's son in the palace; the night will kill him
• Aeneas — in the city; the night will see him fight, lose his wife, and leave Troy on his father's back
• Anchises — Aeneas's father in the city; the night will see his son carry him out
• Ascanius — Aeneas's son in the city; the night will see his father lead him out by the hand

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.