Where the Story Comes From

The gripping account of Troy's last night — the horse, the hidden soldiers, King Priam cut down at his own altar — comes mostly from Virgil's Aeneid, written in Rome over a thousand years after any war could have happened.

Virgil was a poet honoring an empire, not a historian checking records. That does not make the tale worthless. But it means the horse reaches us through art, polished by retelling, with no eyewitness anywhere behind it.