Sack of Troy
The brutal destruction and plundering of Troy during the night following the wooden horse stratagem
The Meaning of Sack of Troy
The Sack of Troy (Iliou Persis) refers specifically to the atrocities committed during the night Troy fell, a subject treated in a lost epic of the same name and referenced throughout surviving Greek literature. Once the Greek warriors emerged from the wooden horse and opened the gates, the returning army swept through the sleeping city. The violence that followed was extreme even by the standards of ancient warfare. King Priam, aged and defenceless, sought refuge at the altar of Zeus in his own courtyard. Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, dragged him from the sacred precinct and butchered him — a sacrilege that horrified even the Greek poets who recorded it. Cassandra, princess and prophetess, clung to the statue of Athena in the goddess's temple, but Ajax the Lesser tore her away and violated her at the very foot of the sacred image. Astyanax, the infant son of Hector and Andromache, was thrown from the city walls on Odysseus's order, to prevent any heir of Hector from surviving to seek vengeance. Andromache, Hecuba, and the other Trojan women were divided among the victors as slaves. Polyxena, Priam's youngest daughter, was sacrificed at Achilles's tomb. The Greeks set the city ablaze, and its destruction was total. The sacrilegious acts committed during the sack brought divine punishment upon many of the victors: Athena turned against the Greeks for the desecration of her temple, scattering their fleets with storms and condemning many to years of wandering.
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Fun Fact
The sacrilege committed by Ajax the Lesser against Cassandra in Athena's temple was so notorious that the city of Locri sent two maidens annually to serve at Troy for a thousand years as atonement
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