A Son of the Rock

The Trojan Horse wasn’t.

Trojan that is.

So why are computer programmes (or anything else) designed to undermine systems from within called trojans?

It’s always bugged me that the word trojan is used in this way.

It’s a strange transference because it was the Greeks, not the Trojans, who actually built the horse. The Trojans were the victims, not the perpetrators. It wasn’t their horse.

But try referring to the Greek Horse and see if people look at you as if you’re the one who is daft.

The Trojan Laocoon, on seeing the wooden horse, is said (in Virgil’s Aeneid) to have uttered the phrase, “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” (translated as “I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts”) as a warning to reject the gift. This was before he was killed and the Trojans wheeled the horse in.

Given what happened to the Trojans “I fear the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts” would be an even more powerful sentiment. For here was certainly a case for looking a gift horse in the mouth! (There is, I know, a different origin for this latter phrase.)

Maybe all this trojan nonsense is because the Greeks won, albeit only by trickery, and history is written by the winners (or, in the Greeks’ case, by their successors and admirers the Romans.)

Of all the Trojans Cassandra in particular has subsequently got the worst press. (For being what Margaret Thatcher would have called a Moaning Minnie.)

But Cassandra was right, Troy was doomed. (Thank you, Private Fraser.) It was just her misfortune to be disbelieved.

Woe, woe and thrice, woe.