The Sack of Troy

Author: Virgil

Time Period: 1 CE–500 CE

Country or Culture: Rome

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

During the Trojan War, Greek military forces lay siege to the city of Troy for ten fruitless years. Finally, the Greek leaders develop a plan to defeat their enemy once and for all. They construct a giant wooden horse, and the best warriors hide inside its hollow body. After presenting the horse as a peace offering, the remaining Greeks depart to lie in wait on the island of Tenedos. The Trojans debate whether to accept the horse, and the priest Laocoön runs down from the citadel to urge the Trojans not to trust the gift, which will surely lead to their downfall. He declares, “Men of Troy, trust not the horse. Whatever it be, I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts” (Virgil 319; bk. 2). With these words, he hurls his spear into the horse’s wooden flank.

Next, a band of young Trojan men appears with a Greek stranger they have captured. The stranger, Sinon, spins a long tale of mistreatment at the hands of his fellow Greeks: his kinsman Palamedes was killed, and Sinon himself was harassed by the Greek hero Ulysses and chosen to be sacrificed to the gods. He claims to have fled his impending death and begs the Trojans for mercy. Priam, king of the Trojans, treats Sinon kindly and asks him to explain the massive gift. Sinon declares that the Greeks built the horse in atonement to the goddess Minerva because their warriors Diomedes and Ulysses had defiled her temple. Sinon claims that the Trojans’ acceptance of the gift will make them victorious in war.

Nearly persuaded, the Trojans are fully convinced after they witness a final, terrible portent: from the ocean, two deadly serpents approach the beach, “licking with quivering tongues their hissing mouths” (331). Once ashore, they immediately attack Laocoön and his two young sons, killing them. The Trojans interpret this as divine punishment for Laocoön’s disrespect of the horse, so they haul the structure into the city and begin to celebrate their victory.

That night as the Trojans sleep, the departed Greeks return and unite with the warriors whom Sinon has freed from within the horse. Just as the Greeks begin to storm the city, the Trojan Aeneas, a son of the goddess Venus, has a dream in which the slain Trojan hero Hector announces that their city is falling. He commands Aeneas to take his household gods and flee, and he prophesies that Aeneas will wander the seas but eventually establish a “mighty city” (337). Aeneas wakes and attempts to fight the Greeks as the city burns. He and a few companions slay enemies and steal their armor to disguise themselves. This ruse works temporarily, but they are soon attacked by Trojans who mistake them for Greeks.

Greek forces destroy Priam’s castle, breaking through the doors and murdering Priam’s son Polites and then Priam himself. Aeneas nearly kills Helen, the Greek beauty whose seduction by the Trojan prince Paris began the hostilities, but Venus prevents him and urges him to flee the city. Aeneas’s father, Anchises, at first refuses to leave but is quickly persuaded by an omen. When the family has nearly reached the gates, Aeneas discovers that his wife, Creusa, is missing. He rushes back to search the city, and her ghost suddenly appears. In a moving farewell, she describes her fate and prophesies his happy future of kingship and a royal wife by “the Lydian Tiber” (369). After trying and failing to embrace the ghost of Creusa three times, Aeneas escapes the city with his father, his son, and many other Trojan companions.

SIGNIFICANCE

The Roman poet Virgil’s account of the fall of Troy appears in book 2 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas recounts the story to the Carthaginian queen Dido and her court. As a mythological event, the sack of Troy had been long established in Greek culture prior to Virgil’s retelling in the Aeneid, which was written between 29 and 19 BCE. The most notable account appears in Homer’s eighth-century BCE epic poem the Iliad, which tells the story of the Trojan War from the point of view of the Greek heroes, with emphasis on the warrior Achilles and his struggles with his Greek comrades. As a Roman poet writing approximately seven centuries after Homer, Virgil had very different objectives in representing the sack of Troy. Because ancient Roman culture drew so heavily on Greek antecedents, Roman writers frequently used Greek source material and strove to distinguish their achievements from those of their Greek predecessors while matching the greatness of Greek culture. Writing at the dawn of the Roman Empire, Virgil was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to write the Aeneid as an epic representing the empire’s origins and greatness—an epic that would rival the Greek classics.

Through his devotion to duty and his successful founding of Rome, Aeneas is meant to embody the greatness of the empire. Thus, the hero renders the perspective of the Trojans—the mythological ancestors of the Romans—in the ancient war, which Virgil portrays with dramatic brilliance in book 2 as he describes the horrors of Laocoön’s death, the burning city, the deaths of Priam and his son, and the apparitions of Hector and Creusa. Through these details, Virgil not only creates a Roman version of an old myth but also renders the psychological inner life of his heroes. Aeneas is not simply a one-dimensional warrior driven by duty. He often experiences doubts and apprehension, which make his character and Virgil’s portrayal of the making of empire both fascinating and more complex than the characterization in the Greek epics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Haynes, French Leo. “Shakespeare and the Troy Story.” Howard College Bulletin 80.3 (1922): 67–131. Print.

Knight, W. F. Jackson. Vergil, Epic, and Anthropology: Comprising Vergil’s Troy, Cumaean Gates, and the Holy City of the East. New York: Barnes, 1967. Print.

Lapham, Lewis H., and Peter T. Struck, eds. The End of the World. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Print.

Miller, Frank Justus, trans. Two Dramatizations from Vergil. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1908. Print.

Virgil. Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.