'The Odyssey' Butchered The Real Trojan Horse Story - Here's Why

Historical epics are hard to get right. Too faithful to the source material, and you have a solid chance of alienating audiences. Take too many liberties, and the hardcore historical fans will nitpick it to death. Then, you have historical epics like The Odyssey (2026), a story that Christopher Nolan planted in fantasy while adapting the Greek epic on a scale never seen before. 

There are some historically accurate moments in the film. While you may think that the opening, a huge sequence dedicated to the end of the Trojan War and the famous Trojan Horse, may be one of those moments, it actually couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, most info about the Trojan Horse is wrong, and The Odyssey perpetuates a myth that shouldn’t be taken as true. So if you want to know the real history behind the Trojan Horse and what actually happened in The Odyssey’s opening minutes, get ready to learn about trade routes, sieges, and horse leather.

What Do We Know About The Trojan War?

The Odyssey, both the film and the epic by Homer, is very much historical fantasy. Gods influence the events of the story, and Odysseus fights many mythological creatures that almost certainly do not exist, but it does begin with the end of the Trojan War. As for what happened in the actual war, there isn’t an agreed-upon consensus on the events. However, these are the facts that most historians agree upon as true.

The Trojan War was a conflict between early Greece and the rival civilization of Troy. By this point, the Greeks, who were originally known as the Myceneans, were the first people to have settled on the Greek peninsula and were able to develop seafaring techniques thanks to a neighboring civilization, the Minoans. Over time, the Myceneans would become one of the dominant powers of the Aegean Sea, but the other was Troy, which controlled the Hellespont, a strait that separates the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea. 

There are theories as to why the Myceneans invaded Troy, but the most credible theory is that because Troy had control over the Hellespont, it gave them leverage over all trade to and from the two seas. If the Myceneans wanted to expand economically, they would have to fight Troy for control of the strait. So, no, it wasn’t because the Trojans kidnapped Helen of Troy. In reality, it was about economic expansion. The Myceneans attacked Troy, but the city proved difficult to invade because of its large walls, resulting in a siege to starve them out. Eventually, the Myceneans penetrated the city and burned it to the ground. 

How Accurate Is The Story of The Trojan Horse In 'The Odyssey'?

The Odyssey claims that the Myceneans were able to sneak into Troy thanks to Odysseus’ plan to hide in a giant horse and launch a sneak attack. Is that accurate? Not at all because, in all likelihood, there was no Trojan Horse.

Constructing the Trojan Horse would have required a ton of effort from every aspect of the Myceneans’ military to accomplish, which is more difficult than you may think. Greece was divided into numerous city-states, each with its own independent armies that rarely worked together. Even if they all decided to set their differences aside and work together without issue, coordinating them on this one complicated plan would be a Herculean task.

They had to construct the horse, hide their ships and phalanxes to make the deception believable that they abandoned the battle, and then find a way to make all parties aware of when the trick worked. There are too many moving parts, and to paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

But even then, there are a lot of eyebrow-raising facts about the Trojan Horse that just don’t make sense with how warfare was conducted back then. Sieges were common, but they hardly lasted 10 years, as The Odyssey claims. At most, it would be a few months, and even then, there were some seasons when it would just be impossible to conduct a siege, like in the winter months. Also, making the Trojan Horse a gigantic wooden horse is simply inefficient. Why go through the trouble and design challenges to make a giant horse? It’s a lot of pageantry for an army that prefers function over form to construct a giant horse to trick their enemies without any guarantee that it would work.

Also, can we just acknowledge that the strategy is pretty stupid, right? The Myceneans, after sieging the city of Troy for some time, had the resources to construct a giant wooden horse, and they thought the Trojans would just let it into the city? The Trojans had fought numerous conflicts against the Myceneans, and unless they wanted to lose, the Trojan Horse would have been treated the same way as the Trojan Bunny from Monty Python & The Holy Grail (1975) once it entered the city.

What Actually Happened With The Trojan Horse

So the very idea of the Myceneans constructing a horse to invade Troy doesn’t pass the sniff test. That isn’t to say it’s impossible, but the odds aren’t good. So what’s the truth? How did the Myceneans defeat Troy?

There are three theories as to what actually happened. The most likely answer is that the Trojan Horse was, in reality, a siege engine constructed by the Myceneans. Siege engines were common, and most armies would cover them in animal hide to make them fireproof. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the Myceneans to kill the plentiful number of horses surrounding Troy and use their leather to make a siege engine capable of breaching the city walls. It could have also been a warship that sailed into Troy, as Homer in the poem refers to the Mycenean ships as “horses of the deep,” which checks out, given how Troy was a port city that could be easily sailed into, and ports being notoriously difficult to defend in ancient warfare.

The other theory is a bit more unlikely, but still totally plausible. Troy exists in modern-day Turkey, which is built upon a seismic fault zone, meaning that it’s prone to many earthquakes. Some historians claim that Troy was destroyed in an earthquake, and the Trojan Horse is instead meant to symbolize their defeat. After all, Poseidon was considered the god of horses and earthquakes, and it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Homer to conflate the two together as Poseidon passing judgment on the Trojans. It’s a stretch, but it’s more likely than Odysseus building a giant horse to enter Troy.