The Fall of Troy
After years of siege, the Greeks use the Wooden Horse to enter Troy, bringing the city and the Trojan royal house to destruction.
The Story
Even after Hector's death, Troy did not immediately fall.
Achilles himself died before the end of the war.
Later tradition commonly describes Paris killing him with an arrow, often with Apollo's assistance.
Ajax and Odysseus then competed for Achilles' armour.
Odysseus won.
Ajax, humiliated and driven into madness, eventually killed himself.
The Greeks still needed a way through the walls of Troy.
The solution was associated above all with Odysseus.
A great wooden horse was constructed.
A group of Greek warriors hid inside it while the rest of the army appeared to sail away.
The Trojans discovered the horse outside their city.
Some warned against bringing it within the walls.
Cassandra understood that disaster was coming.
Laocoön also warned the Trojans in a famous later tradition.
But the horse was taken into Troy.
The city celebrated what seemed to be the end of the war.
During the night, the Greeks hidden inside the horse emerged.
They opened the gates.
The Greek army returned.
Troy was destroyed.
Priam was killed.
Members of the royal family were slaughtered, enslaved or scattered.
The women of Troy became some of the most tragic figures in later Greek drama.
Yet not every Trojan died.
Aeneas escaped with survivors and became the centre of traditions that would later become enormously important to Rome.
The Greek victory also carried consequences.
The destruction of temples, killings committed during the sack and failures to respect the gods created anger that followed many Greek heroes on their journeys home.
Winning the war did not mean escaping its aftermath.
Key Figures
Why It Matters
The fall of Troy marks the destruction of the greatest city of the Heroic Age and begins the final stage of the heroic world. The survivors' journeys lead directly into the Odyssey, the Oresteia and later Roman traditions concerning Aeneas.
Traditions & Variations
The Wooden Horse is not narrated in detail in the Iliad. Much of the familiar fall-of-Troy tradition comes from the Odyssey, lost epic material and later Greek and Roman sources. Accounts differ over the deaths and fates of many Trojan figures.