The Scaean Gate

The famous gate of Troy, the one the Greeks finally broke through after ten years of siege. Teilo names it once, in the chapter where the Laestrygonians have just destroyed eleven ships. Odysseus, watching the wreckage, thinks of the men who died there: brothers who had crouched beside him inside the horse, who had held the line for ten years beneath the walls of Troy, who had waded through the dead at the Scaean Gate to end the war and level the city. The gate is shorthand for the worst of it, the closest fighting, the moment when the city’s wall stopped being a wall. It belongs in the same breath as the wooden horse and the burning. A name that means: this is what we survived together. And now even that has been taken.