Odysseus and the Little Iliad: The Cunning Behind the Trojan Horse

The Little Iliad, a lost epic of the Trojan Cycle, details how Odysseus orchestrated the Greek victory through cunning rather than force. After the deaths of Achilles, Hector, Memnon, and Ajax, the Greeks faced a stalemate. Odysseus, known as polytropos (man of many turns), devised a series of trials: recruiting Philoctetes with Herakles' bow (who killed Paris), retrieving the bones of Pelops, recruiting Neoptolemus (Achilles' son), and stealing the Palladium statue from Troy with Diomedes. Finally, inspired by Athena, Odysseus had Epeius build a hollow wooden horse. The Greeks hid inside, burned their camp, and sailed to Tenedos. The Trojans brought the horse inside, celebrating their apparent victory. The poem ends with the horse inside Troy, setting up the sack in the next epic. The Little Iliad, attributed to Lesches of Lesbos (7th century BC) or Cinaethon of Sparta (8th century BC), survives in only 20-30 lines. It was criticized by Aristotle for having too much plot, lacking the unified action of Homer's Iliad. An alternate tradition in the poem has Neoptolemus capturing Aeneas as a slave, contradicting Virgil's Aeneid.