To this day, the Trojan Horse stands out as a ruse to beat all ruses. The hollow statue filled with Greek soldiers is rolled into ancient Troy as a peace offering. The stratagem smashes the impregnable fortified city of the Trojans, ending a 10-year war with a decisive Greek victory.
Every schoolchild knows the story, or should. But wait until you hear the rest of the tale.
Some intriguing possibilities are explored in "Lost Books of the Odyssey," a wickedly clever novel by a Silicon Valley computer scientist who holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence. Zachary Mason's book has already been hailed as a dazzling and marvelous literary debut, and there's much about this collection of 44 vignettes to suggest it's destined to become a cult classic.
"Lost Books" scrambles and rearranges the elements of Homer's 2,800-year-old "Iliad" and "Odyssey," creating a literary mash-up of hypnotic intensity. Seen afresh through this prism, the Homeric details sparkle with Technicolor brilliance, animating a distant past that's too often preserved in aspic.
The slender volume is introduced to readers as a translation of ancient papyrus scrolls unearthed from an Egyptian midden heap. These are alternate versions of classical lore as they might have circulated in antiquity before they were edited and canonized in epic verse by Homer.
In one of the recurring images of this imaginary apocrypha, we see Odysseus returning home to Ithaca after the defeat of Troy. Each episode suggests one of the possible outcomes for his life, his fate and destiny never certain, always in peril. These variations on the homecoming theme - navigating ruins, mirages, sorceresses - evoke the profound otherworldliness that ancient travel must have been.
Making sense of these riddles, dreams and illusions requires no prior knowledge of Homer or ancient history. The brief vignettes, some of them shorter than this article, stand on their own and play off each other like a house of mirrors.
At the end of his life, Odysseus takes one final voyage, retracing his journey in reverse: from Ithaca to Troy. Upon arriving, he finds the city he destroyed turned into a theme park specializing in re-enactments of the Trojan War.
