Odyssey 8.511 · Book 8, lines 511–513
The city's doom, sealed in the horse
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αἶσα γὰρ ἦν ἀπολέσθαι, ἐπὴν πόλις ἀμφικαλύψῃ δουράτεον μέγαν ἵππον, ὅθʼ ἥατο πάντες ἄριστοι Ἀργείων Τρώεσσι φόνον καὶ κῆρα φέροντες.
For it was fated to perish, once the city should enclose the great wooden horse, when all the best of the Argives sat within it, bringing slaughter and doom to the Trojans.
Word by word
The setting
Demodocus, the blind Phaeacian bard, is singing the tale of the Wooden Horse at Alcinous's feast. He has reached the pivot: Troy's fall was fixed the moment the Trojans dragged the horse, packed with Argive champions, inside their own walls.
A note on this passage
The song states the outcome as fate before it tells the deed. Troy's ruin was fixed the moment the city took the horse inside — the wooden horse with the best of the Greeks hidden in it, carrying slaughter and doom to the Trojans.
The Greek word order makes the trap physical: the city ‘covers over’ the horse (ἀμφικαλύψῃ), as if swallowing it — the same verb used of earth closing over the dead. The Trojans bury themselves by taking the gift in. Homer lets the doom-words φόνον and κῆρα fall at the line's end, so a sentence about a triumph of craft lands on death.
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