Chapter 5 - The Trojan Horse (Equus troianus)

Summary

This chapter revolves around the famous story of how the Greeks managed to get into the city of Troy concealed in a gigantic wooden horse – and thus won a long and drawn-out war. The chapter follows this story and dismantles the odd human/animal hybrid at its core in the ultimate aim to explore how notions of animality define the human at war. Moving away from the ‘othering’ at work in the previous chapter, this one illustrates an area of existence in which analogies between human and animal prevail. Fighting emerges as an area of life in which our animal side comes to the fore.