Aeneid Book 2, lines 234 - 245

The Trojan Horse enters the city

by Virgil

Sinon, a Greek spy, has allowed himself to be captured, won the pity of the Trojans with a hard-luck story and spun them a line about the wooden horse. One could respect Sinon’s courage, but we see from the lying and sacrilegious oaths he swears that he is unworthy. The horse is, he says, an offering to atone for an exploit by Odysseus and Diomedes which has slighted the Goddess Minerva. Calchas the seer has prophesied to the Greeks that they must seek new omens at Argos to have any chance of success at Troy, and now they are homeward bound. The horse has been built so large because the Greeks do not want the Tojans to get it into the city and reap the good fortune that would follow. Sinon’s story, and the death of Laocoon, convince the Trojans to breach their walls to bring in the horse.

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dividimus muros et moenia pandimus urbis.
accingunt omnes operi pedibusque rotarum
subiciunt lapsus et stuppea vincula collo
intendunt. scandit fatalis machina muros
feta armis. pueri circum innuptaeque puellae
sacra canunt funemque manu contingere gaudent:
ille subit mediaeque minans inlabitur urbi.
o patria, o divum domus Ilium et incluta bello
moenia Dardanidum! quater ipso in limine portae
substitit, atque utero sonitum quater arma dedere:
instamus tamen immemores caecique furore
et monstrum infelix sacrata sistimus arce.
tunc etiam fatis aperit Cassandra futuris
ora, dei iussu non umquam credita Teucris.
nos delubra deum miseri, quibus ultimus esset
ille dies, festa velamus fronde per urbem.

We breach the walls and open the city’s defences.
All ready themselves for the work, slide rollers
beneath the feet and stretch hempen cables round
the neck. The deadly weapon tops the walls,
pregnant with arms. Around, boys and little maidens
sing hymns and joy to touch the cable: menacing,
the horse slides up into the heart of the city.
O Fatherland, Troy, home of Gods, Trojan bulwark
famous in war! Four times on the gate’s very edge
it stopped, four times arms rang from its belly!
But we paid no heed and, blind in our madness,
put the cursed portent in our hallowed citadel.
Even then Cassandra opened her lips to coming doom,
by divine decree never to be believed by the Trojans.
We, wretches whose final day that was to be,
garlanded the shrines of the Gods with gay boughs through the city.

`

More Poems by Virgil

  1. Juno throws open the gates of war
  2. The death of Pallas
  3. Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
  4. Juno is reconciled
  5. Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
  6. Aeneas’s ships are transformed
  7. Love is the same for all
  8. Aeneas and Dido meet
  9. Storm at sea!
  10. The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
  11. Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
  12. What is this wooden horse?
  13. The death of Priam
  14. Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
  15. Rumour
  16. Juno’s anger
  17. The Harpy’s prophecy
  18. The Syrian hostess
  19. The Fury Allecto blows the alarm
  20. Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
  21. Virgil’s perils on the sea
  22. Aeneas rescues his Father Anchises
  23. In King Latinus’s hall
  24. Mourning for Pallas
  25. New allies for Aeneas
  26. The farmer’s starry calendar
  27. Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
  28. The natural history of bees
  29. Venus speaks
  30. Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
  31. Turnus the wolf
  32. The Aeneid begins
  33. The Trojan horse opens
  34. The death of Priam
  35. Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse
  36. Aeneas prepares for a hopeless fight
  37. How Aeneas will know the site of his city
  38. The infant Camilla
  39. Vulcan’s forge
  40. Turnus at bay
  41. Aristaeus’s bees
  42. Aeneas joins the fray
  43. Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
  44. Virgil begins the Georgics
  45. The Trojans reach Carthage
  46. The death of Euryalus and Nisus
  47. King Mezentius meets his match
  48. The journey to Hades begins
  49. Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
  50. Aeneas is wounded
  51. Aeneas’s oath
  52. King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
  53. Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
  54. Mercury’s journey to Carthage
  55. Dido’s release
  56. Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
  57. Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story
  58. More from Virgil’s farming Utopia
  59. Omens for Princess Lavinia
  60. Dido falls in love
  61. Jupiter’s prophecy
  62. The farmer’s happy lot
  63. The portals of sleep
  64. Dido’s story
  65. Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
  66. The death of Dido
  67. Turnus is lured away from battle
  68. Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
  69. Sea-nymphs
  70. Virgil predicts a forthcoming birth and a new golden age
  71. A Fury rouses Turnus to war
  72. Laocoon and the snakes
  73. Cassandra is taken
  74. Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
  75. Rites for the allies’ dead
  76. Aeneas arrives in Italy
  77. Helen in the darkness
  78. Catastrophe for Rome?
  79. The boxers
  80. Signs of bad weather
  81. The battle for Priam’s palace
  82. Charon, the ferryman
  83. Aeneas tours the site of Rome
  84. Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
  85. Palinurus the helmsman is lost
  86. Into battle
    87. View Latin Poems