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  • Writer's pictureAndrew C. Fox

Tree of the Week: The Trojan Horse

Updated: Aug 26, 2020

Ok, so I'm cheating here. Not one month in, and I'm cheating.


But the Trojan Horse is a critical example of why it is so helpful to understand the use of species in the ancient world.


In the last Tree of the Week, which was more than a week ago (apologies, fell a little behind), I wrote about the fir tree, or abies wood, which was widely used for ships, both in actuality (as Theophrastus told us), and in metaphors - which I didn't discuss last week, because it was already a pretty long post. The gist of these metaphors are that 'fir' is used interchangeably for 'ship'. Think along the lines of 'leather hitting willow' equating to a cricket ball hitting a cricket bat in modern language.


A moment's silence for the loss of the cricket season please.

Thank you.


Anyway, back to it.


In Roman literature, there are two references to the wood that the Trojan horse was made of. The first is in Vergil's Aeneid, an epic about the Trojan refugees, and the second is in one of Propertius' Elegies, a series of poems about the city of Rome. Both of these poets moved in the same circles, and shared the same patron, in Maecenas, who orchestrated the literary output of the infant Empire. And that wood is the fir.


They do use slightly different words for it (Propertius uses an old poetic term, abiegnus, while Vergil uses abies), but both words refer to the same tree. My attention was first really drawn to this when Alison Keith mentioned it in a keynote at a conference in Montreal as potentially being a literary in-joke between two friends. At the time, I thought it was perhaps a circular reference to the trees that carried the Trojans from Troy, also made of abies (among other woods). Since then, I have changed my tune.

The Trojan horse was made of ship wood, according to the Romans. This would have been readily available at the end of the long Trojan war, because, bluntly, there were fewer people to take home than were taken to the war.


As a result, we might be able to argue that Vergil and Propertius, both of whom had lived through the fall of the Republic, and were writing in the immediate aftermath of decades of civil war, used abies as a nod to the cost of war, a frequent theme of their poetry. Audiences of their poetry may have been accustomed to reading abies as meaning 'ship' too, since it is a common usage of the word in Latin literature.


The Trojan horse, then, shows us how a little exploration of the wood type that is being referenced can bring out fresh meaning in passages that have been discussed over and over again.


A spanner in the works

Of course, things are never quite so simple. In the Iliad, Patroclus' funerary pyre was constructed of trees felled on the slopes of Mt Ida. In the same passage, Homer specifies that these trees are oaks (Iliad, 23.119). There was wood available for the creation of a huge pyre at the end of the war, and presumably enough for a horse (if it even existed). Similarly, Apollodorus, who was writing well after Homer, Vergil, and Propertius, tells us they were felled, but does not give a tree type.


And that's the beauty of myths. They could be (and were) changed to suit an author's particular agenda. And if that could be done by the subtle insertion of fir wood, then that's all well and good.

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