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