Within the depth-psychology corpus, the Trojan Horse functions as a remarkably condensed symbol whose interpretive weight shifts according to the theoretical frame brought to bear. Otto Rank, writing in ‘The Trauma of Birth,’ offers the most explicit psychoanalytic reading: the horse is the ‘direct unconscious counterpart’ to figures such as the Centaur and Sphinx, and Troy itself—penetrable only through cunning—is rendered as a maternal symbol, its underworld associations and labyrinthine structure confirming the womb-logic at work. Walter Burkert, in ‘Homo Necans,’ situates the wooden horse within the ritual calendar of dissolution, linking the fall of Troy to the Skira festival and noting the antiquity of the ‘wooden horse’ tradition already fixed by the Odyssey. The Homeric texts themselves—particularly as transmitted through Lattimore and the Hesiodic Epic Cycle—supply the primary narrative corpus: the horse as cunning stratagem, debated by the Trojans, ultimately dedicated to Athena, and concealing armed Greeks who emerge to sack the city. Gregory Nagy foregrounds the emotional and poetic register: Odysseus weeps when Demodokos sings of the Trojan Horse, revealing the term’s power as an emblem of kleos, grief, and heroic memory. A further, suggestive gloss appears in the Iliad commentary tradition, where divine gifts—like the Wooden Horse—are said always to ‘hide a terrible cost inside.’