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