Sinon

Sinon's part is the second half of the Trojan Horse plan. The horse alone was not enough, because the Trojans had to choose to bring it inside. In Apollodorus's Epitome, the Greeks put their best men into the horse under Odysseus, then burned their tents and left Sinon behind with orders to light a beacon. They sailed off by night and waited near Tenedos.

Virgil, in Aeneid Book 2, gives Sinon a far larger role. Trojan shepherds drag him before Priam with his hands bound. Aeneas, who narrates, says he let himself be caught on purpose, so that although a nameless stranger he might deliver the gates of Troy to the Greeks. He was ready either to succeed or to die.

His story has three parts. First he cries that he has lost all foothold with the Greeks and that the Trojans want his blood. Then he says he was a companion of Palamedes, whom the Greeks condemned on false evidence, and that Ulysses, the Latin name for Odysseus, hated him for it. Finally he says Ulysses used the seer Calchas to name him as the human sacrifice the gods demanded. He claims he escaped his chains and hid in the marsh.

Priam believes him and orders him unbound. Sinon then explains the horse. He says Diomedes and Ulysses stole the Palladium, the image of Athena, and the goddess turned against the Greeks. The horse, he claims, was built to atone for that theft. Calchas made it huge, he says, so the Trojans could not take it through their gates. If they did, Sinon warns, Asia would one day turn the tables and invade Greece.

Virgil's Aeneas sums it up in one line: Sinon's guile and practiced perjury did what Diomedes, Achilles and ten years of war could not. Immediately after, the serpents kill Laocoon, and the Trojans take that as proof of the horse's holiness. That night the fleet returns from Tenedos. In Virgil, Sinon lets the imprisoned Greeks out of the horse, and they open the gates to the rest of the army.

The sources do not agree about what Sinon actually did. Apollodorus's Epitome has no interrogation scene in the passage on the horse. There Sinon simply lights the beacon on the grave of Achilles once the Trojans are asleep. Virgil is the source for the speech, the capture and the opening of the horse. Later Greek epic adds a violent detail Virgil leaves out.

Quintus Smyrnaeus, in Book 12 of the Posthomerica, makes Sinon a volunteer who promises to do the work even if the Trojans torture him or throw him alive into fire. The Trojans find him, and cut off his ears and nose to make him talk. He holds to his tale that the Greeks fled and that the horse is an offering to Athena. Some Trojans believe him and others suspect him.

Homer does not name him. In the Odyssey, the passages on the horse describe it as filled with men and as dragged into the citadel by the Trojans themselves. Menelaus recalls how Helen circled it, imitating the voices of the chiefs' wives, until Odysseus clamped a hand over Anticlus's mouth. Demodocus sings of the horse at the Phaeacian court. In the passages checked, none names Sinon.

What the sources never supply is an ending. Virgil follows Sinon only to the night he opens the horse. Apollodorus stops at the beacon, and Quintus gives his treatment before the city falls. None of the accounts checked for this page tells what became of him after the sack.