Why the Trojan Horse Was a Boat
and what that has to do with the stories we tell ourselves
I have a theory about the famous wooden horse that Odysseus and the Greeks used to sack Troy, and this insight totally blew open what I understood the Iliad and the Odyssey to be about.
Epic Poems Are Really About Identity
People refer to the two works as the Ancient Greek bible without really thinking about what that means. Just as the the Old and New Testaments were an attempt to unite two different conceptions of what it means to be “a people of God”, the two Greek epics are an attempt by the artists and wordsmiths of ancient Greece to stitch together two radically-different notions of who they are as a people into one coherent cultural identity.
Retconning Greece Before and After The Dark Age
To really help you understand this, you need to know a little about Greek history during the time of the Iliad and shortly after, as well as how myths work.
1. The Iliad is about a massive conflict fought by the Mycenaeans with chariots, horses, and infantry.
The Mycenaean heroes described in this book were largely warriors who fought from chariots. One theory even holds that they weren’t the original inhabitants of Greece but rather invading northern barbarians whose superior weapons were no match for mere farmer militias. These warriors then became the aristocratic ruling class, Conan the Barbarian-style.
2. What follows the time described by Homer is a Dark Age brought on by the invasion of the Sea Peoples.
Heading into the era of civilizational collapse where next to nothing is written down, you have the Mycenaeans keeping records in Linear Cuneiform B, coming out of the Dark Age, you have Dorians and Ionians (and others) adopting the Phoenician alphabet. Who these Sea Peoples are is unclear. Whether they’re related to the Phoenicians is unclear. Whether the Ionians and Dorians are related to the Sea Peoples is unclear.
As if everyone within a territory spanning tens of thousands of miles collectively decided to repress some painful secrets.
What is clear is that the Sea Peoples likely showed up and defeated the Mycenaean charioteers with a new superior weapon: warships.
Sure, Helen may have possessed the face that launched 1,000 ships, and the Mycenaeans were no strangers to sea travel, but did they have cruisers designed to gallop atop the waves and smash enemy vessels? Or did Greece's greatest beauty merely launch 1,000 troop transports?
What does all this have to do with the Trojan Horse?
Well, one way to think about myths are that they are the stories a collective consciousness tells to define itself. In other words, they are mass dreams.
In other, other words, myths are wish fulfillments.
Coming back to the Greeks: you have a group of conquerors who come into a land having just kicked out/intermarried with the previous aristocracy, and a people over which they rule that probably wish there was some kind of continuity between these new kings and the old ones.
And since storytellers and myth makers are in the business of giving the people what they want, you have bards tell the tale of their Achaean ancestors evolving from cavalry to naval power.
The horse that carries men across land becomes a wooden horse of the seas.
Who knows? Maybe there’s even some truth to this. Remember the two epics: 10 years’ ground warfare in Troy and the Greeks have gotten exactly nowhere, their best land champion is dead and the walls are as impenetrable as ever. Their cleverest commander has an idea:
Let’s build a super-ship with a fully covered upper deck. We’ll sail it around to the open harbor/non-walled side of the city, and then rush out and open the gates. Maybe Odysseus employed his signature disguises, or maybe it was so fast that he didn’t need to.
Either way, the horse is not actually in The Iliad, it’s in The Odyssey.
So you have a book focused entirely on land battles followed by a sequel that is almost entirely about seafaring and piracy explaining how the last war ended: a big wooden ride you can put people in.
Some evidence for this theory
In 2017, archaeologist Francesco Tiboni argued that Homer actually meant a kind of Phoenician boat. Because the two words sound very similar in Greek, later folks became certain he meant horse. Maybe Odysseus’s bright idea was to adopt Phoenician tech?
Or maybe, just maybe, Odysseus's ruse was an actual Sea Peoples tactic: sail into a harbor in a covered Phoenician boat filled with hidden warriors, pretending to be friendly traders or religious supplicants (e.g. of Poseiden). Then throw open the gates at night and let the rest of the army in.
Two different cultures, two different value sets: Achilles vs Odysseus
And who are the heroes of these two epics? In the prequel it’s mostly types like Achilles and Agamemnon, proud warriors of commanding authority, honor-bound and kept in check by the complex ecosystem of gods who exist above them. Cousin-forefathers of the Teutonic knights in a sense.
In the sequel, it’s Odysseus the Viking. Bedding nymphs and raiding island towns. Always trying to get one over on the sirens, the Cyclops, even the god of the sea himself. Shows up to dinner dressed as a beggar then locks the doors and murders all his rivals Al Capone-style.
Thus, if epic myths are wish fulfillments for a people, then The Iliad and The Odyssey might be the hoped-for answer to the question, “Who / what are you exactly?”
50% Heavily-armored Noble Warrior
50% Ruthless Trickster Skallywag
This, I think is the key to unlocking our understanding of later Greeks who seem so erratic and puzzling to us, like Themistocles or Alcibiades. Instead of hedgehog or fox, you were basically looking at charioteer or pirate. Every one of them embodied some combination of both.
The most famous example for us today: King Leonidas tricked the Spartan Assembly into letting him go on a suicide mission, then laid his life down with his famous 300 in noble sacrifice to prove a point.
A few more points to back up my thesis for those who’ve stuck around this far:
In the Odyssey, Odysseus descends to the underworld and meets both Achilles and Agamemnon. Then re-emerges in the land of the living to reclaim his throne. You could say this mirrors the experience of Bronze Age Greeks, who also went through a kind of death and rebirth.
It’s not uncommon in history for the new regime to paint themselves as legitimate heirs to the ones they replaced. The mongols adopted local customs, like Kublai in China, or local religion, see Berke Khan. The Holy Roman Emperors were European monarchs with papal blessings.
Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, basically had Virgil write the Aeneid to link him all the way back to the sack of Troy, so that his new subjects, formerly Roman republicans, would feel like they were meant to be ruled by a demigod all along.
Perhaps Augustus knew something about the nature and power of myths that we who view them merely as mindless entertainment do not.
Now what do our myths say about us and what we want to be true?
Anyway, that’s my theory. I tried digging into what made the Aegean Sea Peoples’ ships so great in the hopes of discovering some kind of covered ship design but haven’t had any luck. If any of you reading this know anything about that period of naval warfare, let me know!
I value this analysis. We need so much more thought that lifts us above our received traditions.