Was the Trojan horse story soo popular that no one else tried something similar, or are there historic examples of similar strategies working?

by Goosekilla1
KiwiHellenist

There's probably an interesting story to be told about actual situations where cities were captured by comparable tricks, but it's also pretty important to keep it clear that

  • the specific device of the wooden horse is fictional, and
  • the use of a spectacular or miraculous device for capturing a city is a folkloric-mythological trope that can be seen in other Late Bronze Age-Iron Age legends in the eastern Mediterranean, in Egypt, Israel, and Anatolia.

I mention the second point to really ram it home that it's a storytelling device, a mythical motif, and not a historical siege strategy. For fuller details about other occurrences of similar tropes, you could take a look at this answer I wrote a few months back -- but with the caveat that the wooden horse's fictional nature doesn't rule out tricks being used in sieges.