In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of the story of the Trojan Horse
If you had to name the famous work from classical antiquity which told the story of the Trojan Horse, which work would you name? The work of literature which offers the most in-depth account of the Trojan War, and the defeat of the Trojans by the Greek forces, is Homer’s Iliad, the epic poem about the last stages of the war. And yet the Iliad makes no mention of this crucial part of the Greeks’ victory over their enemies. Readers will look in vain within Homer’s poem for mention of the Trojan Horse.