Sinon

• 1. Introduction

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  Sinon, a Greek warrior of the Trojan War, carries a name drawn from the Greek verb sinomai, which means to harm or to hurt. He is also known as Sinopos. Few names in mythology promise so much damage so plainly. The man who bore it never wins a duel in the stories told about him, and he never storms a wall. He does something quieter. This documentary asks how a single captive could convince an entire city to open itself to ruin. It asks why the greatest Greek poet leaves him out entirely, and who first gave him a voice. It also asks why writers centuries later still reached for his name whenever they needed a word for a liar.

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• 2. Roots Without Homer

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  Autolycus stands at the head of Sinon's family. His son Aesimus was Sinon's father, and his daughter Anticlea was the woman through whom Sinon is counted as a cousin of Odysseus.

  Homer never mentions Sinon. The scene in which he deceives the Trojans appears in neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey. His story is told in Virgil's Aeneid and in other accounts that came later.

  Virgil had a purpose in telling it. The episode is central to the picture he builds of the Greeks as cunning, deceitful and treacherous, which matched a real sentiment among the Romans. The fullest version of the tale begins in book II of the Aeneid, at line 57.

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• 3. Virgil's Captive

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  In book II of the Aeneid, Aeneas himself describes how shepherds found a man outside the walls of Troy. The rest of the Greek army had already sailed away. The shepherds brought their prisoner to King Priam, and the prisoner was Sinon.

  Sinon pretended that he had deserted the Greeks. The giant wooden horse left on the beach, he said, was an offering to the gods, meant to guarantee the Greeks a safe voyage home. He also explained its enormous size. The Greeks had built it too big for the Trojans to move into their city, because a horse inside the walls would make Troy invincible against any later Achaean invasion.

  The tale worked because it fitted together so well. Sinon added a personal grievance to the practical details. He said Odysseus, his enemy, had arranged for him to be abandoned and left to die. A man with such a quarrel seemed to have no reason to lie.

  The Trojans believed him, and what they did next went against advice they had been given.

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• 4. Warnings Ignored

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  Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess, was one voice raised against taking the horse inside. Apollo had given her the gift of prophecy. When she refused to return his love, he condemned her never to be believed.

  Laocoön was the other. He attacked the horse with a spear, and soon afterward two serpents came out of the water and strangled him and his sons. The Trojans read this as punishment for his assault on the horse, and the doubters lost their argument.

  The horse was hauled into the city. Greek soldiers were hidden inside it. When night fell, they climbed out, opened the city gates, and sealed the fate of Troy.

  Sinon had one more role to play. He was an Achaean spy, and he told the Greeks when the men in the horse had begun their fight.

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• 5. The Version of Quintus

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  Quintus of Smyrna tells the story differently in the Posthomerica. His Trojans are preparing to attack the Greek camp when they see smoke rising from it. They approach cautiously and find the camp empty, apart from the Trojan Horse and Sinon beside it.

  The reader learns later that Sinon lit the fire himself, as a signal that drew the Trojans in. When the Trojans surround him and ask gentle questions, he stays silent. They grow angry and threaten to stab him. When he still says nothing, they cut off his ears and his nose.

  Only then does he speak. He says the Greeks have fled and that the horse was built to honor Athena. Odysseus, he claims, wanted to sacrifice him, but he escaped and hid in a marsh. He came back to the horse after the searchers gave up and left. The Greeks stopped looking, he adds, out of respect for Zeus.

  All the Trojans accept this except Laocoön. A giant sea serpent promptly attacks him and his two sons. The rest of the Trojans conclude that he offended the gods, and so they believe Sinon too.

  Feeling sorry for the mutilated captive, and fearing divine anger, they bring both Sinon and the horse into Troy.

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• 6. A Byword for Treachery

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  Dante places Sinon in Canto 30 of the Inferno, in the Tenth Bolgia of Hell's Circle of Fraud. He and the other falsifiers of words suffer a burning fever for all eternity. Dante did not put him among the Evil Counselors. His advice, in Dante's judgment, was false as well as evil.

  In 1595, Lewes Lewknor used the word Sinonical in his work The Estate of English Fugitives. The word was his own coinage, and it turned the name of a Greek captive into an adjective.

  Shakespeare invoked Sinon several times as a symbol of treachery. In Cymbeline, Act 3, Scene 4, Imogen says to Pisanio: "True honest men being heard, like false Aeneas, / Were in his time thought false, and Sinon's weeping / Did scandal many a holy tear."

  In Henry VI Part III, Act 3, Scene 2, the Duke of Gloucester boasts: "I'll play the orator as well as Nestor, / Deceive more slily than Ulysses could, / And, like a Sinon, take another Troy."

  The name had become a comparison that audiences understood at once.

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• 7. Canvas and Novel

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  Artists who drew Sinon usually showed him being dragged into Troy as a captive, with the wooden horse standing behind him.

  One painter appears in George Eliot's historical novel Romola. In Chapter 4, the young Tito Melema is spending his first full day in Renaissance Florence. A barber has just shaved off his long beard and cut his hair to shoulder length. Two of the barber's friends then arrive. One is a painter, who asks Melema to model for Sinon in a canvas showing the moment Sinon successfully deceives Priam.

  Melema, though young, is well enough educated to know exactly who Sinon is. Eliot writes: "Tito Melema started and looked round with a pale astonishment in his face as if at a sudden accusation."

  The choice of role is pointed. Readers who go on with the novel find that Melema is not as fine and upright a man as he seems at this early stage.

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