Ask your friends to name history’s greatest deception and you’re likely to get the same answer every time: the Trojan Horse. Wood, Greeks, “surprise,” Troy burns. It’s the Bohemian Rhapsody of ancient trickery, deservedly famous, but so famous it’s crowded out everything else on the album.
So let’s leave the horse in its narrative stable for a moment and go looking for the deceptions that never made the highlight reel, but absolutely should have. Here are my top favourites.
We’ll start in Babylon in 522 BC, where a Persian nobleman named Zopyrus wanted to help Darius the Great crack the city’s defenses. His solution was not subtle. He cut off his own nose and ears, walked into Babylon bleeding, and told the guards the Persians had done this to him. The city took pity on him, gave him troops, let him prove himself in a few staged skirmishes, and then he opened the gates from the inside. Commitment to a bit does not get more literal than that.
Next, let’s drift into myth for a moment, where Daedalus, the same engineer who’d later build fatal wings for his son, once built a hollow wooden cow so Queen Pasiphaë of Crete could get close to a bull she’d fallen for. These Greeks… wooden cow: 1; wooden horse: 0
Back to war: in 217 BC, Hannibal found his army boxed in by Roman legions at night. His fix was to strap torches to two thousand oxen and send them stampeding up a hillside. The Romans, watching hundreds of bobbing flames, assumed it was the Carthaginians fleeing and gave chase. Hannibal’s actual army walked calmly past them in the dark.
Then, finally, there’s the trick that arguably built an empire. In 547 BC, Cyrus the Great faced the legendary Lydian cavalry of King Croesus outside Sardis. And Lydian horses were the best in the known world. Cyrus knew horses hate the smell of camels. So he pulled every camel from his baggage train, mounted soldiers on them, and sent this camel corps out front. Croesus’s warhorses caught one whiff, panicked, threw their riders, and bolted. We all feel it smells too bad to be true, but it is.