Sinon

Sinon is the Greek who lets the Trojans capture him and, with one carefully built lie, persuades them to drag the wooden horse inside Troy. Ten years of siege had not taken the city; his story opens it in a single night.

The fullest account is Virgil's, in Book 2 of the Aeneid. The Greeks abandon their camp, hide the fleet behind the island of Tenedos and leave the horse on the shore. Shepherds bring Sinon before Priam with his hands bound, and he plays the hunted fugitive. A friend of Palamedes, whom Odysseus had destroyed with a false charge of treason, he claims that an oracle demanded a human life for the voyage home, as Iphigenia's had bought the voyage out, and that the seer Calchas, pushed by Odysseus, named him. He says he escaped the altar and hid all night in a marsh. Moved by his tears, Priam orders him untied.

Then he explains the horse: an offering to Athena to atone for the theft of her Palladium by Odysseus and Diomedes, built so huge that it could not pass the gates, because inside the walls it would protect Troy and turn the war against Greece. Laocoon had already driven a spear into its flank, and when two serpents from the sea crush him and his sons, the Trojans take it as proof. They tear open their own walls to haul it in, and no one listens to Cassandra.

That night, in Virgil, Sinon quietly unbolts the horse and lets out the warriors hidden inside. In the older Greek tradition, the lost epic Sack of Troy summarized by Proclus and the handbook of Apollodorus, it is Sinon who lights the beacon that calls the fleet back from Tenedos. Quintus of Smyrna adds that the Trojans cut off his ears and nose and he still kept to his story. Dante sets him among the falsifiers in the last ditch of the eighth circle of Hell (Inferno 30), burning with fever and brawling with a counterfeiter.