But the ancient epos of Thebes knew no more of Athens than did the ancient epos of Troy. The Athenians could not and did not pretend, like the Argives, Arcadians, and other Peloponnesians, to have taken part in the first great collective Achaean attack on Thebes, an attack led by Adrastus, Tydeus, father of Diomede, Polynices, and the rest.[9] Neither did they pretend, though Ionians dwelt near the Theban Cadmeians in Boeotia, to have aided Thebes in her peril. Athens did allege that the useful Theseus led her army to rescue the unburied body of Polynices, or the bodies of him and Eteocles; it was her favourite boast.[10]
But this tale, as Grote says, "seems to have had its origin in the patriotic pride of the Athenians," in their ceaseless efforts to attach themselves to the great traditions that steadily ignore them. Adrastus, chief of the army which failed at Thebes, came, said the Athenians, as a suppliant to the useful Theseus at Eleusis. Then Theseus, with an Athenian force, vanquished the Thebans, and gave due burial to the dead. Euripides and Isocrates boast of this Flower of Chivalry, Theseus;[11] and Pausanias saw the tombs of Eteocles and Polynices—at Eleusis in Attica.[12] The Thebans denied the fable.
In the return match of the Epigonoi against Thebes, the Athenians did not pretend to have played a part. In the lists of heroes who take a share in the Argonautic expedition, and in the hunt of the Calydonian boar, the name of Theseus appears; but he did no more than Menestheus achieved at Troy. The Ionians in Asia made a desperate effort to connect themselves with the Trojan war by borrowing the descendants of Nestor, the Nelidae, who fled from the Dorians to Athens, obtained the throne, and led the Ionian migration into Asia.[13] The very fact that they had to borrow these refugees, in order to connect themselves with Achaean "saga," proves the Athenian lack of genuine mythical connection with the united efforts of the rest of Greece against Troy.
The burial of Oedipous at Colonus, the topic of the noble tragedy of Sophocles, is, poetry apart, mere body-snatching. The Iliad and Odyssey,[14] and even Hesiod,[15] know nothing of a sepulchral connection of Oedipous with Athens. Oedipous's funeral feast was held at Thebes. These sepulchral connections of Athens with the tale of Thebes are necessarily un-Homeric, for they are based on the very fanaticism of hero-worship, and fall into line with the craze of historic Greece for securing the relics of heroes, who will defend a city if duly propitiated.
Remote Aetolia is far more closely connected with the Tales of Thebes and of Troy than is Athens. For some reason, then, Athens, and with her the Ionians, is "not of the centre," is out of the central legends, and her efforts to attach herself to them are late, and are wholly un-Homeric. Naturally the really old Epic poets knew nothing of these Ionian pretensions, which are the work of Ionian Burkes tampering with the Homeric "Peerage." Athens wished to "have it both ways," to appear as a city that had always been held by the same race,[16] that stood apart, and had been the asylum of exiles from the rest of Greece; and also as a city that took a great part in the legendary history of the rest of Greece, whose traditions did not recognise her share.
Thus it seems probable that Attica was the seat of a people standing somewhat apart, and possessing an older stratum of inhabitants than the makers of Achaean saga. But Athens and the Ionians were not content with this respectable antiquity. The Ionians of Asia, first, in the Cyclic poems (750-600 B.C.) tried to prove that they and neighbouring and friendly peoples had their share in the Trojan war; and, next, the tragedians of Athens carried on this pseudo-tradition in regard to Thebes as well as to Troy. Their versions led the world captive for 2000 years. The oldest indications of the Ionian attempts to connect heroes of Athens and of her neighbours and friends with the Trojan affair are to be read in the fragments and summaries of the Cyclic poems.
Next, we find this cause taken up by the Athenian tragedians; and, lastly, we find in later sources the fables which the tragedians handled with poetic freedom; while, in the pseudo-Dictys of Crete, we have legends derived from the Cyclic poets, from other sources, and from the author's own fancy. The Roman poets, like Virgil, also reflect the Ionian and Athenian traditions, and their hostility to Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, and Diomede, with their partiality for Aias, claimed as a neighbour of Athens, and for the ill-used Philoctetes, and the martyr sage, Palamedes of Nauplia. Homer mentions neither him nor his city.[17]
[1] xi. 321-325.
[2] Leaf, Note to Iliad, iii. 144.