made a show of giving up
the siege and sailed away, but only as far as Tenedos. The Trojans came
out and found the horse, and after wondering greatly what it was meant
for and what to do with it, made a breach in their walls and dragged it
into the Citadel as a thank-offering to Pallas. In the night the Greeks
returned; the heroes in the horse came out and opened the gates, and
Troy was captured.

It seems possible that the "device" really was the building of a wooden
siege-tower, as high as the walls, with a projecting and revolving neck.
Such engines were (1) capable of being used at the time in Asia, as a
rare and extraordinary device, because they exist on early Assyrian
monuments; (2) certain to be misunderstood in Greek legendary tradition,
because they were not used in Greek warfare till many centuries later.
(First, perhaps, at the sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium by Philip of
Macedon, 340 B.C.)

It is noteworthy that in the great picture by Polygnotus in the Lesche
at Delphi "above the wall of Troy appears the head alone of the Wooden
Horse" (_Paus_. x. 26). Aeschylus also (_Ag_. 816) has some obscure
phrases pointing in the same direction: "A horse's brood, a
shield-bearing people, launched with a leap about the Pleiads' setting,
sprang clear above the wall," &c. Euripides here treats the horse
metaphorically as a sort of war-horse trampling Troy.

[29] Her that spareth not, Heaven's yokeless rider.]--Athena like a
northern Valkyrie, as often in the _Iliad_. If one tries to imagine what
Athena, the War-Goddess worshipped by the Athenian mob, was like--what a
mixture of bad national passions, of superstition and statecraft, of
slip-shod unimaginative idealisation--one may partly understand why
Euripides made her so evil. Allegorists and high-minded philosophers
might make Athena entirely noble by concentrating their minds on the
beautiful elements in the tradition, and forgetting or explaining away
all that was savage; he was determined to pin her down to the worst
facts recorded of her, and let people worship such a being if they
liked!

[30] To Artemis.]--Maidens at the shrine of Artemis are a fixed datum in
the tradition. (Cf. _Hec_. 935 ff.)

[31] Andromache and Hecuba.]--This very beautiful scene is perhaps
marred to most modern readers by an element which is merely a part of
the convention of ancient mourning. Each of the mourners cries: "There
is no affliction like mine!" and then proceeds to argu