The Trojan War

These days I can’t help but think about the Trojan war, how clever the Greeks were, how, in the end, careless were the Trojans. Sure, I know, that my musings must seem useless and irrelevant, but please indulge me for a minute.

For ten years the Greeks laid siege to Troy, doing everything in their power to breach the city’s strong walls. But the Trojans held out. Their leaders, Hector, until he was killed, Priam, their king, and Laocoon, their priest, protected them with their courage and wisdom. The Greeks lost many of their heroes, including the strongest of all, Achilles, who had been made invulnerable to any weapon—except for that one spot on his heel. Like the best of us, both individuals and nations, he had an area of weakness.

Eventually, the Greeks, weary and disappointed, seemed to give up and head to their various homes.

The Trojans woke up one morning to find their antagonists gone. And they rejoiced. After all those years of restraint and privation, they could venture outside the walls once again, feast and drink. They cast off the heavy care that had kept them safe all those years. Think of it. They had been locked up in that city for 10 years, and now they were free and victorious to boot. The Greeks, evidently good losers, had left them a token of their victory.

The townspeople flung open the gates that had protected them so well. So many of them were young, full of energy, wanting their lives to go back to normal, their pleasures resurrected and renewed. And then, fatally careless and against the warnings of wise men, they dragged that trophy, the very emblem of the Greeks’ defeat, that hollow horse replete with murder, into the heart of a city thus rendered helpless.

The next day all the Trojan men were dead. The women, raped, and taken as slaves, the children too. Nothing was left of the city.

I know that all this must sound like that lecture in Western Civ. you took as a first-year student. Please trust me. Look:

Those lies are the most irresistible that nurture our fondest hopes, our deepest fears.