The Fall of Troy — Troy (Ilios) (Ἴλιος / Τροία), landfall 1 of 15 on the voyage of odysseus
Homer's Odyssey, Book Departure (post-Iliad). The fall of Troy and the voyage home begins. Traditional location: Hisarlık, Çanakkale, Turkey.
Ten years of war end in a single night. The wooden horse — Odysseus' own device — passes the walls, and Troy burns. Where the nostos begins: the Greeks sail from the smoking ruins of the richest city of the age.
For Odysseus the way home to Ithaca should be a few weeks' sailing along known coasts. Twelve ships leave the Troad with him. None will arrive.
The horse passes the walls
(The war just ended)
Ten years of siege could not take Troy; a lie did. The Greeks burn their camp and sail behind Tenedos, leaving a colossal wooden horse on the shore — an offering to Athena, says the inscription. Inside its belly crouch the best of the Achaeans, and among them the man who conceived it.
The Trojans debate all day. Burn it, says one voice; break it open, says another. At dusk they drag it through the gates themselves, breaching their own walls to fit it through.
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” — Odyssey I, 1–2
The priest who warned them
(The war just ended)
Laocoön, priest of Apollo, hurls his spear into the horse's flank and cries that he fears Greeks even bearing gifts. The gods who have decreed Troy's fall cannot allow the warning to stand.
Two serpents rise from the sea and crush the priest and his sons at the very altar. The Trojans read it as punishment for striking a sacred offering — and their last doubt dies with him.
A warning twice ignored: Cassandra, cursed to prophesy truly and never be believed, also cried out against the horse. The Odyssey's poet knew the tradition well: Homer has the bard Demodocus sing this very episode — with Odysseus, its architect, secretly weeping in the audience.
Sailing from the ruins
By dawn the richest city of the age is a smoking terrace of rubble. The temples are stripped, the men dead, the women divided by lot among the victors' ships.
Here the nostos begins. Odysseus commands twelve ships. Home is a few weeks' sailing along known coasts — past Tenedos, down past Lesbos, around the capes to the Ionian islands. None of the twelve ships will arrive.
The other survivor
(The war just ended)
Through the burning streets a Trojan prince carries his crippled father on his back, his small son's hand in his. Aeneas, son of Aphrodite, is allowed by fate to escape the ruin.
Two journeys leave this shore. One Greek captain sails for home and takes ten years to find it; one Trojan exile sails away from home forever, toward a country not yet named Rome. The ancients loved the symmetry — the Odyssey and the Aeneid begin in the same firelight.
The fleet after this landfall: 12 of 12 ships. The fleet sails whole: twelve ships, some six hundred men of Ithaca and the islands.