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