No Joke

From The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy by Domenico Tiepolo (1773), inspired by Virgil's Aeneid

ODYSSEUS'S GIFT

Achilles tending the wounded Patroclus
(Attic red-figure kylix, c. 500 BC)

People are outrageous on the day called

April Fool's. They do and say the strangest

things and leave us watchers gaping at

their outré tales of aliens from outer space.

So did they make it up, we wonder after each

outrageous offering, or could it be a species

of reality? -- a squishy concept on a normal

day and anybody's guess on this one,

inasmuch as what is real and what is not

might differ for the polyglot, the Huguenot,

the deist, the theosophist, the botanist, the

mystic, the artistic, and of course the

Hellenistic -- in particular, the fabricators

of the legendary Trojan Horse -- the gift

that kept on giving, to the utter

consternation of the previously

unsuspecting population of the ancient

city Troy, and goodness gracious, wasn't

it a joke on them, the clever Grecian

strategem that literally took them in, for

hidden in the massive chassis of the

hollow wooden steed were hundreds of the

fighting Greek elites, who caught the

Trojans fast asleep... or so the classics say

and teachers teach... (but that's another

story for another holiday).

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According to the June 24, 2008, Daily Telegraph (http://tinyurl.com/kt96fv8), "scientists have calculated that the [Trojan] horse was used in 1188 BC, ten years before Homer in his Odyssey describes the return of a warrior to his wife on the day the 'sun is blotted out of the sky....' Odysseus, who came up with the horse idea, took another 10 years to return to his wife Penelope, the reunion associated with the eclipse" of April 16, 1178 BCE.