The sack of Troy
event · 17 works · 25 mentions · 37 anchored passages
Troy's capture · Troy's fall · fall of Troy · the fall of Troy · the sack of Ilium · Ilion's fate · Ilium proud had fallen · Ilium's fall · Ilium's princes are dead and gone · Phrygia's capital... destruction
spoken of as
3 expressionsFall of Troy11 mentions
Aeneid (Latin) · Andromache (Greek) · De Rerum Natura (Latin) · Greater Hippias (Greek) · Philoctetes (Greek) · Agamemnon (Greek)
“Come, illustrious guest, begin the tale,” she said, “begin and tell the perfidy of Greece, thy people's fall, and all thy wanderings.
Sack of Troy6 mentions
Odyssey (Greek) · Epinicians (Greek) · Iliad (Greek) · Orations (Greek) · Isthmean (Greek)
Tell me, O Muse, of that many-sided hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
the fall of Troy4 mentions
Agamemnon (Greek) · Hecuba (Greek) · Helen (Greek) · Aeneid (Latin)
By smoke the captured city is still conspicuous:
in the texts
Aeneid
The night assault in which the Greeks emerge from the horse, open the gates, and destroy the city.
and o'er the ocean fell the veil of night, till utmost earth and heaven and all their Myrmidonian stratagems were mantled darkly o'er.
Along her streets were strewn the unresisting dead;
King Menelaus, Thoas and Machaon, and last, Epeus, who the fabric wrought.
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 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;
Troy from Priam with thy picked troops of Hellenes?
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.
Agamemnon
The military conquest and destruction of Troy by the Greek expedition under Agamemnon, recalled as the war's culminating event and background to the homecoming.
By smoke the captured city is still conspicuous:
The rights o’ the cause, for Ilion’s fate man-slaught’rous
Into the bloody vase, not oscillating,
Eumenides
Agamemnon's destruction of Troy, mentioned as the triumphant expedition that preceded his death at home.
along with him, you made Troy, the city of Ilion, to be no city.
Libation Bearers
The Greek conquest of Troy under Agamemnon's leadership, invoked as a past glory contrasted with the house's present disgrace.
Besides the god’s command, my keen grief for my father, and also the pinch of poverty—that my countrymen, the most renowned of mortals, who overthrew Troy in the spirit of glory, should not be subjected so to a pair of women.
Ah, my father, if only beneath Ilium’s walls you had been slain, slashed by some Lycian spearman!
Epinicians
The eventual fall of Troy to the Achaeans, referenced as the outcome of the war narrated in the Aegina ode.
~ when at last, by the counsels of the blessed gods, they sacked the well-built city of Priam together with the Atreidae with their bronze breastplates.
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;
Helen
The destruction of Troy, cited as the event that removes the original reason for Helen's stay in Egypt.
but no longer, since Troy is wholly destroyed and she has provided her name to the gods;
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?
Isthmean
The twice-repeated sack of Troy by Aeacid-led forces, first alongside Heracles against Laomedon, later in the Trojan War of the Atreidae.
The son of Alcmena led him in ships to Troy, the toil of heroes, for war that delights in bronze, as an eager ally along with the men of Tiryns because of Laomedon’s wrongdoing.
He took Pergamos, and with Telamon’s help he slew the tribes of Meropes, and the herdsman Alcyoneus, huge as a mountain, whom he found at Phlegrae, and he did not keep his hands off the deep-voiced bow-string, not
Twice in battles they sacked the city of the Trojans:
Greater Hippias
The fall of Troy, which opens the frame-story recounted in Hippias's discourse.
After the fall of Troy, the story goes that Neoptolemus asked Nestor what the noble and beautiful pursuits were, by following which a young man would become most famous;
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.