HOW ULYSSES STOLE THE LUCK OF TROY


After Hector was buried, the siege went on slowly, as it had done during
the first nine years of the war. The Greeks did not know at that time
how to besiege a city, as we saw, by way of digging trenches and building
towers, and battering the walls with machines that threw heavy stones.
The Trojans had lost courage, and dared not go into the open plain, and
they were waiting for the coming up of new armies of allies--the Amazons,
who were girl warriors from far away, and an Eastern people called the
Khita, whose king was Memnon, the son of the Bright Dawn.

Now everyone knew that, in the temple of the Goddess Pallas Athene, in
Troy, was a sacred image, which fell from heaven, called the Palladium,
and this very ancient image was the Luck of Troy. While it remained safe
in the temple people believed that Troy could never be taken, but as it
was in a guarded temple in the middle of the town, and was watched by
priestesses day and night, it seemed impossible that the Greeks should
ever enter the city secretly and steal the Luck away.

As Ulysses was the grandson of Autolycus, the Master Thief, he often
wished that the old man was with the Greeks, for if there was a thing to
steal Autolycus could steal it. But by this time Autolycus was dead, and
so Ulysses could only puzzle over the way to steal the Luck of Troy, and
wonder how his grandfather would have set about it. He prayed for help
secretly to Hermes, the God of Thieves, when he sacrificed goats to him,
and at last he had a plan.