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Nobody knows for sure, but probably not. Evidences about the existence of the city of Troy and about a war between it and the Greeks have already been found, but about the legendary horse, nothing. However, this story is so good that it conquered even Hollywood: in the movie Troy, the mythological horse shares the attention with star Brad Pitt. The Greek device of building a huge wooden horse, filling it with soldiers and abandoning it before the walls of Troy is described in detail in the epic poem Aeneid, by the Latin poet Virgil. He tells how the Greeks, pretending to abandon the war, withdrew to a nearby island, leaving the horse as an offering to Athena, goddess protector of Troy. The Trojans welcomed the gift and, during the night, the warriors inside it opened the city gates for the entrance of the Greek army, which massacred the rivals. Other accounts of this fantastic story are attributed to the poet Homer, but the very existence of the writer as a historical personage is uncertain. If the horse actually existed, it must have been built around 1250 BC, when the famous war would have taken place, on the west coast of present-day Turkey. “Various sites on the current Turkish coast were destroyed between the 12th and 13th centuries BC. In other words, the poems reduce events that shook the entire region at the time to a city”, says historian Maria Cristina Kormikiaria, from the University of São Paulo (USP). . Real or not, the Trojan Horse played a key role. “He was an important war symbol for the Greeks. There are those who refer to it as the first war tank of humanity”, says another historian, Margarida Maria de Carvalho, from Unesp in Franca (SP).