Note 811 — Chapter XV · LEGEND OF TROY.

For example, adopting his own line of argument (not to mention those battles in which the pursuit and the flight reaches from the city to the ships and back again), it might have been urged to him, that by supposing the Homeric Troy to be four miles farther off from the sea, he aggravated the difficulty of rolling the Trojan horse into the town: it was already sufficiently hard to propel this vast wooden animal full of heroes from the Greek Naustathmon to the town of Ilium.

The Trojan horse, with its accompaniments Sinon and Laocoôn, is one of the capital and indispensable events in the epic: Homer, Arktinus, Leschês, Virgil, and Quintus Smyrnæus, all dwell upon it emphatically as the proximate cause of the capture.

The difficulties and inconsistencies of the movements ascribed to Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, when applied to real topography, are well set forth in Spohn, De Agro Trojano, Leipsic, 1814; and Mr. Maclaren has shown (Dissertation on the Topography of the Trojan War, Edinburgh, 1822) that these difficulties are nowise obviated by removing Ilium a few miles further from the sea.