DECEPTION: THE TROJAN HORSE
I doubt you’ll recognize this man. His name is Heinrich Schliemann. In 1871, Heinrich Schliemann began to fulfill a dream he’d had since his youth. He started excavating an ancient city in Turkey. He was looking for the lost city of Troy. And to the amazement of many, this retired businessman found it. Today, you can still see the ruins of its towers and its walls, which were 16 feet thick.
Schliemann desire to find the ancient city of Troy can be traced back to his fascination with the Greek stories surrounding it. One of those stories is found in Homer’s Iliad. According to Homer the Greeks besieged Troy for ten years without success. And then when the warrior Achilles was killed, many wanted to give up the fight. But the king of Ithaca, Odysseus, came up with a plan to get the Greek army into Troy. Odysseus built an immense wooden horse may have looked something like this...
Odysseus and his warriors hid inside it. And after leaving the horse at the gates of Troy, the Greek army sailed away. The Trojans thinking the Greeks had given up and had left the horse as a gift, brought it inside the gates.
That night, while the Trojans were sleeping, the Greek ships quietly returned. The soldiers in the horse slipped out and opened the city gates. The Greek army quietly entered Troy and started fires all over the city. The Trojans awoke to find their city in flames. As they tried to flee, they were killed by the waiting Greeks.
(From a sermon by Paul Decker, "Drip, Drip, Drip" 2/8/2009)