English (United Kingdom)
In 342 BC Alexander, son of the great Macedonian king Philip II, needed to show the king that he was growing into a worthy man. One day a horse trader arrived at court, and Philip II bought a stupendous, fiery animal named Bucephalus for 13 talents.
When nobody could tame him, Alexander asked to try. He had noticed that Bucephalus was afraid of his shadow, and so he turned the animal’s head towards the sun before mounting him.
From that moment forward, Alexander and Bucephalus were inseparable, and when the horse died from battle wounds, Alexander had him buried with full military honours, founding the city of Bucephala on the burial site.
But the world’s most famous horse may very well be ‘the Trojan horse’, an actual war machine used by Ulysses and the Greek alliance to defeat Troy.
Homer tells the story of the war in the Iliad, while Virgil narrates the episode of the Trojan horse in the Aeneid.
After roughly 10 years of war, Ulysses came up with an original plan to enter the city and attack from within. He built a huge wooden horse that was left by the sea while the army appeared to withdraw from the battlefield.
The Trojans brought the horse into the city to celebrate their supposed victory, but when night fell, soldiers came out of the belly of the horse to open the gates of the city and allow the sacking and destruction of Troy to get underway.
Aeneas’ escape to the coast of Lazio led to the birth of Rome and its gloris history.
