Aias und Athen: Zur Geschichte einer Polemik

Abstract

Il. 2, 558 is considered by most scholars, ancient and modern, to be a politically motivated Athenian forgery. The verse informs that the Salaminian Ajax landed his ships “where the Athenian phalanxes stood”. This is different from what is told about the position of both contingents and their leaders elsewhere in the Iliad. E. Visser points out the preposterousness of the term “phalanx” in the narrative. Besides, the phrase is catachrestic since it is hardly possible to land ships near the attack formations. Such mistakes are likely to be forced by the conciseness of expression, and it is this unexpected brevity of the Ajax segment in the Catalogue of Ships that is stressed by R. Hope Simpson und J. F. Lazenby who defend it against athetesis. Indeed, the interpolator moved by desire to link Salamis to Athens “could have made a better job of it”. Yet, if seen as a mere supplement to the Athenian part of the Catalogue, the Ajax entry becomes significant in its briefness: not only are the Athenians very pious and their leader Menestheus superior to all chieftains except Nestor, but no lesser hero than Telamonian Ajax sides with them in camp and field. Considering the hyperbolized compliments, the accent put on the worship of Athena in her temple on the Acropolis and the focus on the narrator’s time (vv. 551–552), we should agree with those who believe the Athenian segment to be an insertion made by Homeric rhapsodes for the benefit of Athens. The sceptics ask: if the alleged distortion of the Homeric original was that obvious, why there seems to have been no polemics on it before the late Classical period? For the earliest objections known so far are that of the patriotic-minded Megarian historians Dieuchidas and Hereas. However, it is possible to reveal traces of doubt in still earlier sources, i. e. in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories (c. 67, the account of the two Cleisthenes of Sicyon and Athens) and in the Hesiodic Fragment 204, vv. 44–51 M.–W. (the ‘sub-list’ of Helen’s suitors in the Catalogue of Women). Herodotus mentions the Athenian “ally” Ajax whose name Cleisthenes used while renaming the Attic tribes; there follows the story how another Cleisthenes prohibited the rhapsodic competitions in Sikyon. Ps.-Hesiod attempts to redraw the political landscape of Homeric Greece and to portray its kings in a way corresponding to the Athenian version of the Catalogue of Ships. This questionable version is never cited nor explicitly mentioned, both sources being pro-Athenian. Nonetheless the apologetic tendency is apparent, especially in the second case, thus proving that the forged version of the Catalogue was criticized already in the early period of its existence in rhapsodic performance.