The Trojan horse ambush did not happen

The argument

In the Warner Brothers movie titled 'Troy', we see the Greeks using a huge wooden horse to ambush the city of Troy. As a result, the horse is an image that most of us are familiar with when we think about the Trojan War. However, there is no actual evidence to suggest that there was a Trojan Horse ambush, which indicates that there are many fictitious stories surrounding the war and the city. There are no historical accounts of this ambush at all - the Odyssey is an epic poem filled with mythology, and the Aeneid is a fictional story that the emperor Augustus used as propaganda to connect Romans to Troy. These texts are the only places that give detail about the Trojan horse attack, and they are not reliable by any means. It is also a pretty unrealistic and strange story, not only because of the Greeks hiding in the belly of an enormous horse but also because the Trojans would have to be pretty naive to accept a gift from the Greeks. One suggestion made by scholars is that the horse represents an earthquake caused by Poseidon (Earth-shaker) that weakened the walls around Troy. This makes sense as Poseidon was the god of earthquakes and horses. There's a possibility that the whole Trojan War was a metaphor for the conflict between human civilisation and the gods, rather than any real event. Furthermore, the Trojan Horse is a great allegory for the gods' overwhelming civilisation.

Context

The story of the Trojan Horse is mentioned in both Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey. It claims that the Greeks built a large wooden horse and hid inside it, and then offered it to the Trojans as a gift. The Trojans accepted the horse as a victory trophy and led it through the city gates. At night, the Greeks climbed out of the horse and destroyed the city of Troy.

Premises

Counter-arguments

If there was evidence of the Trojan Horse, the evidence would not still exist, therefore we cannot entirely disprove the theory. Since the horse was made from wood, it would have deteriorated over thousands of years and left no trace.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise misstates the source position. The Odyssey is the earliest surviving account and belongs to an oral poetic tradition rather than to history, which makes it unreliable as reportage without making it evidence of nothing; and the Aeneid is not among "the only places" the episode appears, since it is also in the Epic Cycle, in Athenian tragedy and in later prose accounts. Absence of independent record is expected for events of that period, whether or not they occurred. [Rejecting P2] Implausibility is being measured against the wrong kind of text. That the episode reads as strange is a reason to doubt a literal wooden horse, and scholars have long proposed a siege engine, a ship, or the earthquake reading the argument itself cites — each of which leaves an underlying event intact while accounting for the image. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion does not follow from any of it. Whether one episode within a legend happened has no bearing on whether the city existed, and that is settled separately by excavation: the mound at Hisarlık has yielded a substantial fortified settlement occupied across the relevant periods, with destruction layers, and is identified in Hittite records as Wilusa. A mythologised event at a real place is the ordinary condition of legend; the argument treats the falsity of a story as though it removed the site.