the sack of Troy
event · 9 works · 12 mentions · 18 anchored passages
Troy's capture · Ilium's fall · Ilium's princes are dead and gone · Troy's fall · abandoning Troy to wretchedness · capture of Troy · obsequies of Troy · plunder Troy · sack Troy · sack of Troy
spoken of as
2 expressionsSack of Troy4 mentions
Odyssey (Greek) · Iliad (Greek) · Orations (Greek)
Tell me, O Muse, of that many-sided hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
Fall of Troy3 mentions
Andromache (Greek) · De Rerum Natura (Latin) · Philoctetes (Greek)
no longer in Troy is seen the blaze of fire on altars of the gods with the smoke of incense.
in the texts
Odyssey
The ten-year war and eventual sack of Troy, recounted as the culmination of the narrator's military service in the Cretan tale.
There we fought for nine whole years, but in the tenth we sacked the city of Priam and sailed home again as heaven dispersed us.
Tell me, O Muse, of that many-sided hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
Yet when we had sacked the city of Priam he got his handsome share of the prize wealth and went on board (such is the fortune of war) without a wound upon him, neither from a thrown spear nor in close combat, for the rage of Ares is a matter of great chance.
Andromache
The Greek destruction of Troy, ending the Trojan War, killing Hector and Astyanax and enslaving Andromache; the catastrophe underlying the entire play.
for I have lived to see my husband Hector slain by Achilles, and the babe Astyanax, whom I bore my lord, hurled from the towering battlements, when the Hellenes sacked our Trojan home;
For her sake, O Troy, did eager warriors, sailing from Hellas in a thousand ships, capture and make thee a prey to fire and sword;
and Hellas had been freed of all the anguish she suffered during those ten long years her sons went wandering, spear in hand, around the walls of Troy;
Orations
The traditional narrative of Troy's capture and its associated atrocities, which the speaker argues never happened.
and to slaughter Polyxena, a maiden, on a tomb, and to pour such libations to the son of the goddess;
and that Priam, the king of Asia, in extreme old age, wounded at the altar of Zeus, from whom his race was, should be slaughtered upon it, and that not even this should be wrought by any of the obscure, but by the son of Achilles, and that too one who had been feasted by his father and saved by him before;
Hecuba
The night-time fall of Troy recalled by the Chorus in a choral ode describing the surprise attack, the death of husbands, and their own enslavement.
when through the city rose a din, and a cry went ringing down the streets of Troy:
No more, my native Ilium, shall you be counted among the towns never sacked;
for it was their marriage, which was no marriage but misery sent by some demon, that robbed me of my country and drove me from my home.
Orestes
The legendary war and destruction of Troy over Helen, repeatedly invoked as the deep cause of the hostility toward Helen in the present action.
for she filled all Hellas with tears, through that accursed, accursed Paris of Ida, who drew Hellas to Troy.
So Menelaus endured his painful, painful suffering to recover his wife Helen from Troy to no purpose.
woe to Dardania, its wailing, wailing, for the horsemanship of Ganymede, bedfellow of Zeus.
The Trojan Women
The Achaean conquest and destruction of Troy, including the deaths of Priam and the Trojan men and the burning of the city, which frames the entire window.
with these my eyes I saw their father, Priam, butchered on his own hearth, and my city captured, nor did others bring this bitter news to me.
for since the day that Phoebus and I with exact measurement set towers of stone about this land of Troy and ringed it round, never from my heart has passed away a kindly feeling for my Phrygian town, which now is smouldering and overthrown, a prey to Argive might.
Groves stand forsaken and temples of the gods run down with blood, and at the altar’s very base, before the god who watched his home, Priam lies dead.
Iliad
The eventual fall of Troy in the tenth year of the war, mentioned in passing as part of the wall's future history.
but when the bravest of the Trojans were no more, and many also of the Argives, though some were yet left alive when, moreover, the city was sacked in the tenth year, and the Argives had gone back with their ships to their own country - then Poseidon and Apollo took counsel to destroy the wall, and they turned on to it the streams of all the rivers from Mount Ida into the sea, Rhesus, Heptaporos, …
De Rerum Natura
The destruction of Troy, cited as a benchmark early epic event.
And obsequies of Troy, have other bards
Not also chanted other high affairs?
Philoctetes
Foretold Greek victory made possible by Philoctetes, Neoptolemus, and Heracles' bow.
We have a Trojan prisoner, Helenus, foremost among seers, who says plainly that all this must come to pass, and further, that this very summer must see the complete capture of Troy.
Save you, first, from this misery, and then, together with you, go and plunder Troy’s plains.
Not so, but to be the peer of the best and bravest, with whom you are destined to take Troy and force it to the ground.