Thucydides, Homer and the 'Achaean Wall' Davison, J A Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Spring 1965; 6, 1; ProQuest pg. 5

.. 

Thucydides, Homer and the 
'Achaean Wall' 

J. A. Davison 

I N THE second appendix to his Sather lectures l Professor D. L. Page 
argued in detail the case for believing that "the Iliad current in 
Thucydides' own day did not include the extensive passage in the 

seventh book of which the building of the wall in the tenth year is 
the principal theme" [RRI 316], but that "this large addition to the 
Iliad must have been the work of an Athenian poet" [RRI 323], and 
hence that "such passages were composed, and did enter the vulgate, 
in the fourth century B.C." [RHI 324]. If it could be demonstrated that 
these propositions are correct, no one could deny him the right to 

assert that "Here is one of the most important articles of external 
evidence in the whole Homeric Question" [RRI 316]; indeed, even the 
most obstinate defender of the integrity of our Iliad would be bound 
to surrender at once. The difficulty, as Page reminds us in a biblio­
graphical note [RHI 335], was first put on the agenda of the Homeric 
Question by Hermann in 1846, but in English-speaking lands it is best 
known through the works of G. M. Bolling2; that the difficulty has 
never been felt to be insuperable is implicitly admitted by Page 
eRRI 335: "There have been few discussions since [Hermann], and 

1 History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley 1959) 315-24, 335-40. I refer to this work hence­
forward as HHI. Other works for which I use abbreviated titles are: G. M. Bolling, The 
External Evidence for Interpolation in Homer (Oxford 1925)= EE; G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer 
(Cambridge 1962)=SH; and idem, "The Homeric Poems as History" (CAH 22, fasc.23, 
Cambridge 1964) = HPH. In the first part of the paper (to note 14) and in the appendix merely 
numerical references are to the text of Thucydides; in the second part of the paper (from 
note 14) such references are to the text of the Iliad. For Thucydides I have used chiefly the 
edition by H. Stuart-Jones with apparatus criticus revised by J. E. Powell (Oxford 1942), 
together with that of Book 1 by J. de Romilly (Paris 1953), A. W. Gomme's Historical Com­
mentary 1 (Oxford 1945), and the Lexicon Thucydideum of E.-A. Betant (Geneva 1843-7). Miss 
D. H. F. Gray read an early draft of this paper and made helpful suggestions; she is in no 
way to blame for the use to which I have put them. 

2 Page rightly mentions EE 92-9, but omits Bolling's The Athetized Lines of the Iliad (Balti­
more 1944) and Ilias Atheniensium (Lancaster [Pa.] 1950), which, though they did not reargue 
the case, at least resuscitated it for a while. 

5 



6 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE <ACHAEAN WALL' 

very few of any value"), and is perhaps most clearly shown by the 
fact that Mr G. S. Kirk does not attach anything like the importance 
to it which Bolling and Page have done [SH 218-20, HPH 31-2]. On 
the face of it, then, the suggestion might well be allowed to relapse 
into suspended animation; to me, however, it seems to raise some 
points of importance which are perhaps worth a little further examin­
ation. 

I 
Both Bolling [EE 98] and Page [HHI 319, quoting Iliad 16.30-2] make 

it clear that (in Page's words) "in the Iliad of Thucydides ... the wall 
was built when the ships were hauled up; that is to say at the very 
beginning of the war." It will therefore be as well to begin by exam­
ining what Thucydides says, and to consider whether his words 
support this particular inference. Page [HHI 315] translates the rele­
vant passage [1.10.5-11.2] as follows: 

If we strike the average of the smallest and largest ships, the numbers 
of those who sailed will appear inconsiderable, representing as they 
did the whole force of Hellas. And this was due not so much to 
scarcity of men as of provisions. Difficulty of subsistence made the 
invaders reduce the numbers of the army to a point at which it 
might live on the country during the prosecution of the war. Even 
after the victory which they obtained on arrival-and a victory there 
must have been, or the fortifications of the naval camp could never 
have been built,-there is no indication that their whole force was 
employed; on the contrary, they seem to have turned to cultivation 
of the Chersonese and to piracy from want of supplies. This was 
what really enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years 
against them, the dispersion of the enemy making them always a 
match for the detachment left behind. If they had brought plenty of 
supplies with them, and had persevered in the war without scatter­
ing for piracy and agriculture, they would easily have defeated the 
Trojans in the field, since they could hold their own against them with 
the division on service. In short, if they had stuck to the siege, the 
capture of Troy would have cost them less time and less trouble.3 

He then proceeds: "Let us focus our attention on the sentence in the 
middle: t After they had won a victory on arrival-and this is proved 

3 Except for this crucial sentence it is unnecessary to quote the Greek text: Page gives it 
in full in his note 26 [HHI 335]; his wording follows that of the standard texts (above, n.l). 
except that where OCT and BuM in 1.11.2 have aOp6oL •.• aOp6oL, Page has aOp6oL ••• aOp6w;. 



.. J. A. DAVISON 7 

by the fact that they could not otherwise have built the fortifications 
for their camp,-they did not apparently employ all available forces 
even in the field of operations' (understand: 'any more than they had 
done when mobilizing in Hellas')." 

If we follow Page's injunction and "focus our attention on the sen­
tence in the middle," we are, I think, bound to feel that, whichever of 
Page's distinctly different versions we may prefer to follow, there is 
something strange about the logic which this interpretation ascribes 
to Thucydides. Can it really be compelling evidence that a landing­
force was "victorious in a battle" [HHI335] on landing that they should 
at once set to work to surround their ships and themselves with a wall 
of heavy masonry and timbering [Iliad 12.79, 178], provided with 
towers [Iliad 7.338], KpbOOat [Iliad 12.258], battlements [Iliad 12.308], 
and other appurtenances of what, had they first taken the trouble to 
propitiate the gods, might well have been called 'permanent fortifi­
cations'? I doubt if anyone who had a practical understanding of 
military affairs would suppose it for a moment: it is clear that in such 
circumstances our idea of a force's success on landing must vary in­
versely with the strength of the fortifications with which they at 
once surround themselves. Complete confidence corresponds to 'no 
fortifications'; defences rise as morale sinks. We may ask, therefore, if 
the Achaeans could have begun at the highest point on the fortifica­
tion scale, supposing that they had won such a victory as Thucydides 
implies. It is no defence to say that this is the traditional interpretation, 
to be found in all the standard commentaries on and translations of 
Thucydides; the correctness of the text has been doubted more than 
once, most recently by Professor (then Mr) R. M. Cook,4 and I for 
another have felt for some time that the question needed more dis­
cussion than it has received, in defence not only of Homer's integrity 
but also of Thucydides' reputation for good sense. 

Let us begin by looking at the Greek text of the crucial sentence, as 
it appears in the Oxford text: E7TELD~ De &cpLKb/LEVOL WXXT/ EKp&:T'YJoav 
( '" -, '" , , ,,, - '''''''' I ) ,J.. , O'YJI\OV OE" TO yap epv/La Tcp OTpaT01TEOcp OVK av ETELXLOaVTO , .,.,aLVOVTat 

S' ouSt £vTaiJ8a 1T(XOll Tn SvvaJ-tEL XPYJoaJ-tEVOL, &..\Aa 1TpO~ YEwpy{av Tfj~ 
X I , ", ~ J..-' I A t f EPOOVYJOOV TPE1TO/LEVOL Kat I\T/OTELaV TYJ~ TpO.,.,YJ~ a1TopLCf. par rom 
the parenthesis, this is as plain as anything in Thucydides; only the 
D' after cpa{vovTaL need cause a moment's hesitation, and it is clearly 

4 ProcCamPhilo/Soc NS 3 (1954-5) 3. Unfortunately Cook's note does not argue the case 
in detail; it has therefore gone mainly by default. 



8 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

resumptive after the parenthesis: "When on arrival they won the 
mastery in battle (so much is clear, since ... ), it is evident that they 
did not employ all their force here [i.e. to carryon active operations 
against Ilios], but that they had recourse to cultivation of the 
Chersonese and to piratical raids, owing to the shortage of supplies." 
But the parenthesis is quite another matter; apart from its doubtful 
logic, it has several stylistic oddities: (1) except in 3.105.1 Thucydides 
does not use the middle voice of 7'€LXt,€LV; (2) nowhere else in 
Thucydides is lpv/La the direct object of 7'€LXt,€LV, even in those cases 
where lpv/La perhaps means 'fort'; (3) if a7'pa7'o7do<[' means 'camp',5 
why need it be in the dative? None of these points is of great impor­
tance by itself, but together they may legitimately inspire doubts. 

I am inclined to begin with lpv/La. Betant (s.v.) reasonably distin­
guishes two senses: 'munimentum, propugnaculum' (six examples, 
including our passage) and 'castellum, locus munitus' (five examples, 
three of which refer to the "old wall made of stones picked up by 
hand" by which the Lacedaemonians made their last stand on Sphak­
teria [4.31.2, 35.1,2]. The first sense is the one which concerns us: in 
4.69.2 'houses given battlements' form an Epv/La and are combined 
with 7'EL)(Y1 7'E KctL 7'ctcPpov and palisades into what the next section calls 
a 7'EtXOS; in 4.90.2 Hippokrates begins to fortify Delion, with a trench 
and a mound formed from its spoil &V7'£ 7'E{Xovs-the mound is then 
reverted with stakes and vine tendrils and strengthened with bricks 
and stones from demolished buildings, "and by every means they 
went on raising thelpv/La"; in 6.66.2 the Athenians "planted a palisade 
beside the ships, and quickly raised an EPVWX of sorts (n) on Daskon, 
with stones picked up and timbers"; in 8.40.3 the Athenians on Chios 
are building a wall round the Delphinion, and adding besides an 
lpvwx /L€t~ov about the camp (or army?) and ships (Ka£ U7'pa7'07r€O<[, 
Kat vavuiv epv/La7'os /L€{~ovos 7TPOU7T€pLfJa>JI.O/L€vov); and finally in 8.55.3 
we find Pedaritos with the Chians attacking 7'0 7T€pi 7'dS vavs epv/Lan 
and getting possession of some of the ships (V€wV nvwv ••• EKP&'77JUav) , 
whereupon the Athenians "charge out upon them to the rescue" 
(E7TEK{3oTj{}Tja&.v7'wv) and chase them off, inflicting considerable loss. 
This last case is particularly interesting, since the Athenians have both 
a 7'ELXOS Ccf 8.40.2: ~ U7'pand 7'WV 'A{}Tjvalwv fJ€fJalws loog€ /L€7'Ct 7'€{Xovs 
;,opvaOaL), though it is not yet finished (8.40.3; &7'tfAOVS 5v7'os), and are 

Ii It need not; Thucydides uses the word quite as often in the sense" army" as in the sense 
"camp" (Bet ant s.v.). 



J. A. DA VISON 9 

adding an ;pv!-'-a to surround camp and ships. Later [8.55.3] the ships 
evidently have an ;pv!-'-a to themselves, with the Athenian troops in an 
inner fortification Ccf the restored Viking camp at Trelleborg, where 
a separate mound, much lower than that surrounding the crews' 
living quarters, marks off the area in which ships were beached). An 
;pv!-'-a, then, seems to be what we should call a <field fortification', 
which may vary in strength from zero Ccf. 1.117.1 acpapKTc.p Tip 
UTPWT07T€Dc.p)6 to a quite solid, though always more or less improvised, 
structure. 

A more generally illuminating example is that to which Gomme, in 
his long note on 1.11.1, draws attention: the first operations against 
Mytilene early in Book 3. The Athenians having, owing to Mytilenaean 
haverings, acquired a beachhead EV MaMCf to the north of Mytilene 
[3.4.5], are later attacked by the Mytilenaeans, who did not "have the 
worse" of it, but had no self-confidence and retreated [3.5.2]. The 
Athenians, feeling rather stronger, called in allies and "walled two 
camps" (ET€{XLuav UTpaTCJ7T€Da D&o) on either side of Mytilene; they cut 
the Mytilenaeans off from using the sea, but the Mytilenaeans and the 
other Lesbians who had now come to their help controlled (EKpaTovv) 
all the land, except for small areas round the camps [3.6.1-2]. The 
Athenians, Thucydides tells us, were doubtful from the beginning 
about the feasibility of operations against Lesbos [3.4.3], so that even 
when the arrival of allies gave them some confidence their tactics 
were still Periclean: they shut themselves up behind their walls, 
leaving the control of the land to their opponents. "Look here, upon 
this picture and on this": the enterprise of the Samians after their 
temporary success in 1.117 (above, note 6), and the defensive-mind ed­
ness of the Athenians in 3.4.6 and (more excusably) in 8.40 and 55. 
It must be admitted that Thucydides' later words (in 1.11.2) ascribe 
rather more enterprise to the Trojans, and show a good deal less 
understanding of the strategic dilemma facing the Achaeans, than 
Homer does. Indeed Thucydides goes out of his way to blacken the 
picture of Achaean inactivity by talking about "cultivation of the 
Chersonese": there is no evidence for this, either in the Iliad and 
Odyssey or in what little we know of the cyclic epics. For anything we 
know to the contrary the Achaeans could have grown crops on their 

6 Athenian camp attacked by Samians, who won such a victory that "they ruled 
(lKpaT'Y/Uav) in their own neighbourhood for fourteen days, importing and exporting what 
they pleased." 



10 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

own side of the Hellespont unmolested for nine years; all that military 
security would have required would have been adequate covering 
parties. Thucydides also minimizes the force which Agamemnon 
brought with him: even on his own calculation (an average of 85 men 
per ship) it must have amounted to nearly 100,000 men in nearly 
1,200 ships, a respectable force for the whole of Greece to raise, one 
would think, even in Thucydides' own time. 

The answer to the question about the walling of the camp must 
now, I think, be clear: if Thucydides was acquainted with a poem 
which described the camp as walled from the beginning, he muddled 
himself (and his readers) very badly by suggesting that this was a 
proof that the Achaeans "won the mastery in battle" on arrival: what 
it would prove, if anything, would be that the Achaeans, in spite of 
their initial victory, were too few in numbers (and perhaps too short 
of confidence as well) to undertake immediate operations against 
Ilios. It is not impossible that this is what Thucydides meant, since it 
would fit reasonably well into the context, but one may ask why, if 
Thucydides meant that, he did not say it. Perhaps after all the text is 
corrupt, as Professor D. S. Robertson and Mr Cook suggested; and 
what Thucydides really said was something which we might para­
phrase as follows: "in spite of the confidence induced in them by the 
military superiority which they gained on landing, which is shown by 
the fact that they did not at once equip their camp with perimeter 
defences of any sort, they still muddled away their advantage by not 
taking the shortest possible route to victory." 

Thucydides' idea of how the campaign ought to have developed 
shows that, allowing for his tendency to think in fifth-century terms 
(e.g., circumvallation), his picture of the actual state of affairs prevail­
ing in the Achaean camp before Ilios is not so very different from the 
one which we gather from our texts of the Iliad: a first battle on land­
ing, and after that no direct operations against Ilios-reconnaissances, 
perhaps, and negotiations (as in Iliad 3.305ff), but otherwise only 
piratical raids of the type organized by Achilles [Iliad 9.328-9] and per­
haps also by Odysseus (else how had he come by the title 71'TOAllTop8o~, 
which he already has in Iliad 2.278, and which he alone of the Achaean 
heroes shares with Achilles?).7 For the military explanation of this 

7 Odysseus' title may be anticipatory; by his share in the taking of Troy Odysseus will 
become the champion TTTO>.tTTOp8os of the age. Or it may be the working of formulae: 
1TTO>J.TTOp8os 'AXLMt"vS''''' TT. 'Ollvuut"vS'. But formulae with TTTO>.tTTOp8oS' (sometimes in oblique 
cases) could be made up to suit most of the major heroes. 



J. A. DAVISON 11 

development we can only fall back on the Iliad: it is evident from the 
beginning of the poem that the Achaeans have long since decided 
that Ilios is not to be taken by regular siege operations, whether by 
circumvallation and starving or by the use of such primitive means as 
the Trojans and their allies employ against the Achaean wall in Iliad 
12; the only hope is to capture the city as a result of a pitched battle 
in the plain, as a result of which pursuing Achaeans and fleeing Tro­
jans "ming!' d in a mass" rush through the still open gates into the 
city-and those of the Trojans who cannot escape or die fighting 
surrender. All therefore that the Trojans have to do is to remain 
behind their walls, and not let themselves be lured or goaded (by 
Achilles' AVUTEicXt, for example) out to battle before the walls of the 
city. The Achaeans, faced with a stalemate, cannot cut their losses and 
go home, since by so doing they will recognize that Paris-Alexandros 
is now de jure as well as de facto fEMV7Js 7ToatS ~ijKOJ.1,QLO, and hence, now 
that the Dioskuroi are dead [Iliad 3.243-4],8 king of Lakedaimon in 
right of his wife. The Achaeans can only hang on until the tenth year, 
in the hope that Kalchas' prophecy will then prove true [Iliad 2.324-

30]; and it is one of the many 'ironies' of the early books of the Iliad 
that they do not see that Achilles' withdrawal is the essential first step 
towards breaking the deadlock-now at last there is a chance that the 
Trojans will "come out" to battle, and the end of that can only be the 
coming of that day "when holy Ilios shall be destroyed." But before 
that the Achaeans have vicissitudes to undergo, and the course of those 
vicissitudes as described in the Iliad up to the building of the wall in 
Iliad 7 makes no allusion of any kind to any fortification round the 
camp (or to any security measures whatever-the picquets of Iliad 9 
and 10 appear to be a new idea when they are first mentioned): when 
the Achaeans muster in Iliad 2 [455-78] they simply pour out of the 
camp on to the assembly ground, whereas the fall-in in Iliad 11 has to 
take account of the ditch [Iliad 11.48,51] and hence of the wall,9 even 
if the fighting later in the book does not seem to. This of course is due 
to the fact that in Iliad 11 the fighting is still well out on the plain: the 
wall makes itself felt again at Iliad 11.599fI where Achilles, standing 

8 The significance of this fact, and the added Significance of the fact that Helen is ignorant 
ofit, have been regularly missed by modern commentators; but this is why the Achaeans 
must recover Helen. 

S The picquets in 9.87 post themselves between the wall and the ditch (would they not 
be better on the wall, or further out towards the enemy? But the voice of military reason 
awakens no answer from Homer-or from Agamemnon's bright young men.) 



12 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE <ACHAEAN WALL' 

on the poop-deck of his ship at the west end of the Achaean encamp­
ment, cannot see the face of Nestor's passenger (the chariot, it seems, 
came in through a gate some way east of where Achilles is standing 
and at once turned east-Achilles of course knows Nestor well 
enough, but does not recognize Machaon from behind).l0 

There is simply no trace at all of any fortification, however insub­
stantial, round the Achaean camp in the first six and a half books of 
our Iliad; and therefore an <Iliad' in which a solid stone wall was built 
round the camp at the very beginning of the war would be a poem 
so different in content from ours that it could not be usefully invoked 
in any discussion of the internal evidence for the textual history of our 
Iliad. As I have shown there is evidence that Thucydides had other 
things in his mind as he wrote 1.11.1-2 than could have come from 
our Iliad, which (for example) is silent about the cultivation of the 
Chersonese, and even (as Miss Gray pointed out to me) implies that 
the Chersonese was held by Trojan allies [cf Iliad 2.835, 844-5]. 
Thucydides has not any explicit reference to military agriculture in 
his own time, but such agriculture is a commonplace in the histories 
of forces on detached service for long periods-if you cannot get the 
civil population to grow enough food to feed the troops, why then the 
troops must set to and plough and sow and reap and mow for them­
selves (this must have been the experience of anyone who took part 
in the siege of Poteidaia, for example). Thucydides may therefore be 
talking in fifth-century terms when he speaks of farming the Cher­
sonese, and in Peloponnesian War terms when he assumes that the 
Achaean camp must have had an EpVJ.La. In any case it is clear that, 
whatever poem it may have been that Thucydides had in mind, it was 
not one which described the initial landing, or the events which 
followed immediately upon that, in any detail, if at all: for the initial 
landing he has to use inference as we do, and it is clear that his version 
of the catalogue of ships must have tallied very closely with ours. 

If then he had an Iliad like ours in other respects, what about the 
wall? Let us look again at what our texts make Thucydides say: 'T6 
YdP EpVJ.La 'Tip u'Tpa'TcYTrlScp OVI( av E'T£LXluaV'TO. Whether this potential 
sentence means "they would not" or "they could not have walled the 
fortification for their camp (or <army')," it is offered us as proof of the 
military superiority of the Achaeans on landing in the Troad. I have 

10 This is the answer to Kirk's difficulty about what becomes of the wall between the 
end of 8 and the beginning of 12. 



J. A. DAVISON 13 

already argued that, militarily speaking, this is nonsense: if the 
Achaeans on landing built the wall which has to be stormed in Iliad 12 
and 13, they evidently had no confidence in the completeness of their 
initial victory nor in the duration of their superiority, and the Trojans 
would hardly have left them free to build it (is it to push the point 
too far to ask whence they would have obtained their materials, when 
they were still unacquainted with the terrain? Or was Kalchas' seer­
ship [ef Iliad 1.72] equal to that problem too?) Thucydides had more 
knowledge of military affairs than to imagine such things, much less 
write them: he may not have had as much experience as we have had 
in the last fifty years in the conduct of opposed landings on enemy 
territory, or about the customary reactions of landing forces when 
once they are established ashore, but he knew the late fifth-century 
formula for operations against a hostile city, and this influences his 
own account of what must have happened before Ilios. He cannot 
have gathered from our Iliad anything about the cultivation of the 
Chersonese or about an €pv/-,a round the camp before the wall was 
built or about the possibility of circumvallation; even if the heroic 
age recognized the last as a feasible operation of war, the Iliad makes 
it clear that the Trojans had too many allies for such a thing to be pos­
sible in the particular case. No: what Thucydides is trying to tell us is 
that "the Achaeans won a crushing victory on landing (as is proved 
by the fact that they did not < then> provide the perimeter of their 
camp with a wall)"ll-and the text must be read accordingly. 

The simplest correction is that proposed by Cook (above, note 4): 
aV€T~LxtaaV7"o for dv J7"~LxtaaV7"o. This is not really any change at all, 
since in Thucydides' own orthography the two phrases must have been 
indistinguishable; the only question is whether aV~7"~LxtaaV7"O could be 
the right word for the meaning required, and Page has argued that it 
cannot be, since it is first attested for Xenophon in the sense 'build 
up again', of Konon restoring the walls of Athens after Knidos (RR! 
338, note 31, where the word is described as "very nearly non­
existent" on the evidence of Liddell and Scott and Dindorf's The­
saurus). This argument is not in fact as strong as Page's emphatic 
language makes it appear. I have been through all the prepositional 
compounds of 7"Etxt~w recorded in L5J, and checked them for Thucy-

11 It is not necessary to require Thucydides to have written the bracketed word or to 
adopt D. S. Robertson's ingenious <€T€t t' > £T€tXluCWTO; Thucydides is writing allusively, 
for readers whom he expects to recognize the allusion. 



14 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

didean usage in Betant, and have set out the detailed results in an 
appendix to this paper. It will there be seen that of the twelve com­
pounds listed only J7nTELxt~w and its derivatives give a consistent 
picture, both semantically and historically, and secondly that there is 
no word in the list as it stands which could exactly describe the action 
proposed by Nestor, which is "to face the outside of a previously 
created earth rampart with a solid stone wall." The nearest to this 
which Thucydides comes, as I have already suggested, is in the forti­
fication of Delion [4.90.2-4], where the Athenians first throw up an 
earth mound (xovv) and then revet it, by planting stakes alongside it 
(aTuvpovS 7TUPUKUTU1T'1}'YvVVTES) and interlacing them with vine tendrils. 
Had the Athenians had more time (or more labour, or better materi­
als) at their disposal, they might have faced the EPVP.U which they left 
behind them with a TEtXOS; and though the most accurate Greek for 
this might be 7TUpUKUTUTEtXL~ELV, this compound is not quoted from 
anybody-even if it were, Thucydides shows no fondness for com­
pounds in 7TUPUKUTU-.12 aVETEtxtauVTo may not therefore be entirely 
objectionable as a means of saying "they ran a facing wall along the 
mound," but if this is felt to be too hazardous a conjecture, JVETEtXLauvTo 

might be suggested, in the sense 'they fortified, i.e. walled in defen­
sively'. Even in Thucydides a7TOTEtXL~W and 7TEPtTEtxt,w already show 
precisely the ambivalence which this conjecture would attribute to 
JVTEtxt,W; and it may be noted that JVTEtXt{W is the only compound of 
TEtxt~W which Thucydides uses only in the middle voice. If however 
it is still to be maintained that Thucydides in fact wroteav JTEtxtaav-ro, 

then the conclusions are inescapable: (1) Thucydides, of all people, 
wrote nonsense on a matter within his own professional experience; 
and (2) Thucydides was not talking about our Iliad. 

Page writes as if there could have been only one text of the Iliad 
"current in Thucydides' day," and this text he later calls "the vul­
gate." Even in 1959 he might have been aware that some people at 
least had their doubts about this single pre-Alexandrian "vulgate,"13 
and Kirk shows that he has profited by more recently published work 
on the production and circulation of books in the ancient world when 
he writes [SH 219-20]: "it seems reasonable to conjecture that there 
had been at least two poetical versions of the Trojan fighting, in one of 

12 He has only 7TapaKa-ra-fJ.rlK7J. ->"d7T~LV. -IXEtv for certain; Powell's apparatus shows that 
the Mss have their doubts about 7TCXPCXKCX-rCX1T'T}yvVVT£S in 4.90.2. 

13 Cf my "The Study of Homer in Graeco-Roman Egypt" (Akten d. 8. Internat. Kongr. f. 
Papyro!ogie, Wien 1955 [=MPER NS 5 (1956)] 51-8, especially 55). 



J. A. DAVISON 15 

which the wall was an important factor and in the other of which it 
was not." In so far as it recognizes the relative fluidity of the 'Homeric' 
canon in the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C., Kirk's formula­
tion is acceptable; but I hope that I have shown that, so far as Thucy­
dides is concerned, the supposed version of "the matter of Troy" 
in which the wall "was there all the while" may well be a chimera, 
and that, if it ever existed, it has no relevance to the question of the 
content of the poem which we call the Iliad at that or any other 
period. Thucydides cannot, in my judgement, have meant what his 
editors and commentators want to make him mean; and if he did 
mean that after all, the poem which he was talking about was not our 
Iliad, nor a direct ancestor of it. 

ApPENDIX 

Compounds of TEIXIzn 

NOTE: the information in this appendix has been extracted from the ninth 
edition of Liddell and Scott (revised by H. Stuart-Jones and R. McKenzie, 
Oxford 1925-40) and from the Lexicon Thucydideum of E.-A. Betant (Geneva 
1843-7). If a translation contains italic letters it has been taken verbatim from 
LS}, otherwise it is new. 

(1) aV7"LTHxl,W, "erect counter-fortifications", ''fortify instead" (both Josephus; 
Philo has the word once in a metaphor); Thucydides [2.77.1] has only 
aV7"LT€lXLup.a "counter-fortification" (once in Athenaeus). 

(2) a1TOT€Lxl,W, "wall off" ("1. by way offortifying" quoted only from Herodo­
tus, but Thucydides has it once at 3.51.3); Thucydides uses the verb (frequently) 
and its derivatives in -ULS and -p.a in sense "2. by way of blockade". Other 
meanings quoted from later writers are "keep off by fortification" (Plutarch), 
"wall off, separate" (Julian), "build a party-wall" (middle, Lucian), "raze, dis­
mantle" (Polyaenus, who also has a1TOT€lXLULS, "slighting"). a1ToTHXLUP.OS 
"blockading" is used by Plutarch. 

(3) SLaTHxl,w, "cut off and fortify by a wall" (Aristophanes, Lysias, Polybius in 
concrete senses; Xenophon, Philo and Lucian in metaphors). Thucydides has 
only OLaT€tXLup.a, in two senses: "internal cross-wall" [3.34.2, 3] and "switch­
wall" [7.60.2]. 

(4) €KT€LXl,W, ''fortify completely": Thucydides has it four times [4.4.1, 45.2; 
7.4.5,26.3], but none of these justifies" completely"; "fortify as far as possible (or 
'necessary')" seems to come nearest. 



16 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

(5) EVTEtXl,w, "build or fortify in a place" (Isocrates, Xenophon, Dionysius of 
Halicarnassus, Josephus); the middle, "wall in, i.e. blockade" is in Thucydides 
[6.90.3], and in the sense "fortify" in Nicolaus of Damascus, Plutarch and Dio 
Cassius. 

(6) E1TLTELXl,w, "build a fort . .. on the frontier of the enemy's country, to serve 
as the basis of operations against him" and its derivatives are very common in 
Thucydides and in later writers; there is no recorded change in the meaning 
of the words in this group. 

(7) ~vVTEtXl'w, "help build a wall": Thucydides [4.57.2, 7.7.1], once in Xeno­
phon ;"enclose within the same wall" (fourth century B.C. inscription, Colophon). 

(8) 7TapaTEtX"w, "fortify besides" (Philostratus only). Thucydides has 7Tapa­
TElXLU/La "cross-wall" [7.11.3, 42.4, 43.5] of Syracusan counter-walling (he uses 
the verb 7TapOLK08o/LEiv). 

(9) 7TEPLTELXl,w, "wall all round" for defence: Aristophanes, Thucydides [5.75.5]; 
"surround with a wall, so as to beleaguer" -this is Thucydides' preferred sense, 
both for the verb and for its derivatives in -O'tS, -/La, -/L6S. The defensive sense 
however reappears in Xenophon, and lives on to Vettius and Themistius (who 
also has 7TEptTElxLULS defensive). 

(10) 7TP0aTEtX"w, "include in the city-wall": Thucydides [6.3.2], Dionysius of 
Halicarnassus. The obviously legitimate "build a wall against" is not attested. 

(11) 7TPOTEtX'{W, "protect by a wall" (Strabo and Gloss.). Thucydides has 
7TPOTElXLU/La, "advance fortification, outwork" [4.90.4; 6.100.2, 102.2; 7.43.6], as 
do Polybius, Lxx and later writers. 

(12) tJ7TOTELXl{w, "build a cross-wall": Thucydides [6.99.2], Appian; Thucydides 
has also tJ7TOTElXLatS and tJ7TOTElXLU/La [both 6.100]. 

I have not thought it necessary to repeat the information about eXvaTELxl,w 
given by Page [HHI 338, note 31]. 

II 
What then about the internal evidence of the Homeric text as it has 

been transmitted to US?14 "Consider first," Page adjures us, "the 
speech of Nestor (H 327-43); and notice above all the enormous fault 
in the structure of the poem. 'We have suffered heaVily,' says Nestor; 
'it is high time to stop fighting, to collect and cremate our dead, and to build 
high towers and a trench to protect our army from being crushed by the 
attack of these proud Trojans: Suppose that you did not know what has 

a Henceforward all merely numerical references are to the text of the Iliad. 



J. A. DAVISON 17 

happened in the Iliad up to this point: you would of course infer that 
the Achaeans must have been hard pressed, that they are on the 
defensive, the Trojans attacking. For the first time in ten years the 
Achaeans must build a defensive wall. At the very least, then, you 
would laugh to scorn the notion that what has happened up to this 
point is an unbroken run of success for the Achaeans. 

"But that is what really has happened. The wonderful successes of 
Diomedes are the principal theme of the Fifth Book and the earlier 
part ofthe Sixth" (HHI321; Page's italics]. It is difficult to know where 
to stop quoting Page's as always eminently quotable prose; but by 
this point the raptest reader should have recovered his wits and be 
anxious to ask some questions. Page's report of Nestor's words is 
accurate enough, except that he should perhaps have put 'to protect 
our ships and ourselves' for 'to protect our army' (Nestor says: 
ElAap Vl'}wv TE Ka~ aVTwv, 7.338); but no one who has read the Iliad 
attentively up to this point ought to accept for a moment Page's pic­
ture of the background to this coundl. Night has just fallen on the day 
which began at 2.48, and the events of that day have been narrated in 
3,599 hexameters, requiring not less than 51- hours for redtation,t5 
that is to say in almost minute-for-minute detail, starting with the 
clear account of the disastrously low morale of the Achaean army in 
general, faced at last after nine years of almost complete military 
inactivity16 with the appalling idea that now, at the very moment 
when Achilles and the Myrmidons (who are in fighting trim, thanks 
to what Thucydides calls ATlanta) have suddenly withdrawn from the 
alliance, they should go out and fight the Trojans-who will, ex 
hypothesi, be going all out for victory, in the hope of disposing of the 
other Achaeans while the only serious obstacle to their success is 
temporarily off the field. From the still deeper abyss of despair into 
which Agamemnon at once plunges them [2.110-41] the Achaeans 
are rescued by the exertions of Odysseus, who not only re-assembles 
the troops (and their officers) but with what must be the finest speech 
ever composed for such an occasion [2.284-332] works them up to 
fighting pitch. The familiar ritual of the assembly parade may bring 

16 For the argument on which this estimate depends, see below, pp. 23-25. 
18 Those who, in default of actual experience, have read much of the literature produced 

between 1919 and 1939 by participants in the trench warfare of 1914-18 will not have 
forgotten the emotions of the Aaol or canaille ("which in this war," a Major-General is said 
to have observed, "includes everyone from divisional commanders downwards") when 
faced with a move from a quiet sector of the front to an active one, or vice versa. 

2-G.R.B.S. 



18 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

its comfort to the troops (unless they think of why they have just 
sharpened their spears); in any case Book 3 brings the Achaeans the 
vicarious excitement of the duel, and the momentary relief of its 
apparently unambiguous verdict in favour of Menelaos; but this is 
followed almost immediately (alas, for the partisan log-rollings of 
Olympos!) by the deep disappointment of the wounding of Menelaos 
in breach of the truce [4.86££] and the realization that the war must go 
on. Agamemnon, who seems to lose no opportunity of inspiring alarm 
and despondency in those around him, makes such a fuss over 
Menelaos that even the victim rebukes him [4.184-7]; but, though the 
treachery has not succeeded,17 it has by its commission sealed the fate 
ofIlios, provided that the Achaeans do their duty. This however means 
that they must now go out and fight battles; and by way of giving us 
(and them) an idea of what that fighting may be like, the poet pro­
vides another frightening example of Agamemnon's disastrous in­
competence as a leader, in the 'E1T£7TwA"f}ats.18 The battle then begins, 
at 4.446. In the next eighty lines thereafter, two of the contingent 
leaders named in the Catalogue, Elephenor and Diores, are killed 
[470; 526]. Up to this point only one such commander has been killed; 
Protesilaos died at the landing, "much the first of the Achaeans," as 
the Catalogue rightly says [2.702]. With Elephenor and Diores many 
troops also died [4.543-4]. 

Though Book 5 is not unfairly called L1toJL~Sovs apta7'ELa, his success 
is far from unbroken; he has a sharp brush with Aineias, which leads 
to Diomedes' reluctant recoil before Apollo [443], after which Apollo 
rescues Aineias. Then comes a great Trojan counter-attack, headed by 
Ares and Hektor, in which another commander, Tlepolemos, is 
killed with full heroic honours by Sarpedon [5.628-69], and which 
becomes so dangerous that Here and Athene have to intervene [711], 
Athene personally. Then the gods leave the battlefield, and Book 6 
begins with an Achaean break-back [6.5-72], which develops so 
seriously that Hektor has to return to Ilios and try to win Athene's 

17 It is to be noted that. ifMenelaos had been killed, the whole Achaean enterprise would 
have lost its purpose, since there would not have been anyone left to dispute Paris' posses­
sion of Helen. 

18 Agamemnon, it should be observed, is portrayed in the Iliad as a general worthy of 
such connoisseurs of the contrast between outward appearance and inner reality as Archi­
lochus and Mr Siegfried Sassoon. He may look like a combination of King Arthur and Richard 
Coeur-de-Lion (e.g. 11.16-46), but in fact he is a brute, a bully, a military incompetent, and 
a snivelling coward (witness his unmanly shrieks when he is scratched in 11.269-79, and 
compare his demeanour with that of the seriously wounded Diomedes or Odysseus or 
Eurypylos later in the book). 



J. A. DA V1SoN 1~ 

intervention against Diomedes, although in fact Diomedes seems to 
have lost a lot of his fighting spirit, to judge by his dealings with 
Glaukos [119-236J. At this point fighting, for anything that we are 
told, seems to stop for a time, but the situation still looks dangerous 
to amateur tacticians like Andromache and most commentators. 
Homer thinks that the most the Achaeans could have done was to 
drive their opponents back within the walls, but Andromache sees 
the Achaeans rushing and climbing the wall itself, by the wild fig-tree 
[433-4]. The beginning of Book 7 brings us, with Hektor and Alexan­
dros, back to the battlefield; and now the tide turns again and begins 
to run strongly against the Achaeans; but both sides are by now prac­
tically exhausted, and they naturally welcome Hektor's challenge: 
watching a single combat between champions will be a nice change 
from fighting, giving the spectators all the thrills of war, sua sine parte 
pericH. But this requires an Achaean to be found to face Hektor [7.93]: 
the shilly-shallying of the Achaean heroes, until Telamonian Aias is 
finally chosen by lot to be their representative [94-182], is the clearest 
possible evidence that Achaean morale is again at a low ebb: and 
though Aias has just enough of the advantage over Hektor to justify 
Aias' friends in hailing him as the victor, the heralds declare the duel 
a draw [7.279-81J. 

SO ends the first full day's fighting which the Achaean host as a 
whole has experienced in over nine years. In these few hours eighteen 
Achaeans "of name" (even if we know no more of them than that) 
have died at the enemy's hands, and the troops have perished in 
uncounted heaps (cf 5.758 for the execution wrought by Ares). There 
is therefore plenty of reason for Nestor to put the burial of the dead 
at the top of the agenda; and since the Achaeans have evidently left 
the Trojans in possession of the battlefield, the Achaeans must now 
ask for the necessary truce. This would be common form, win or lose: 
the bodies of the dead must be collected and buried. So far, all seems 
to be straightforward: but what about the wall? As I have shown, 
Page's picture of "an unbroken run of success" for the Achaeans will 
not do: as long as Achilles is off the field, some pro-Trojan deity (and 
it is evident to some of the Achaeans, and not least to Nestor [cf. 
2.80-3], that Zeus himself may at any moment be found on the Trojan 
side)19 may sweep the Achaeans into the kind of rout which Ares has 

19 Poseidon is in fact another doubtful supporter: as a general rule he is staunchly pro­
Achaean, but in 20.318-49 he suddenly rescues Aineias without explaining why he should 
take a personal interest in Aineias' survival. \Vhen one thinks of the arguments which the 



20 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

already caused them in 5.454-710, or there may be an unlucky run of 
casualties among the leading champions (as there soon will be, in 
Book 11), and before the Achaeans know what has happened to them 
they may find themselves being "tamed beside the seafaring ships," 
as Hektor has just reminded them (7.70; it is more likely to this than 
to Hektor's words to the Trojans in 8.181 or 530-41 that Agamemnon 
refers in his whine to Nestor in 14.44-7). There is no fault in all this: 
if we pay attention to the text of Homer, we can understand both 
why there has not been a wall up to now and also why one must now 
be made, since a day's fighting has shown the previously unappre­
hended danger. 

And so we come to the burial, which Nestor ingeniously (once 
again "the very model of a modern Major-General," as in 4.293-310)20 
contrives to combine with the wall building. The procedure, as he 
describes it, is simple and natural, with one exception (which I 
italicize): "Let us gather the dead ourselves and wheel them here 
with oxen and mules, and then let us burn them to ashes a little way 
out in front of the ships, so that each may take the bones home to his children 
whenever we return to our native land. Then let us create one mound 
over the burning-place, raising it without distinction from the plain, 
and against it let us quickly build high walls as a defence for ships 
and men" [7.332-8]. Omitting for a moment the italicized words, 
which can only be excised from the text by a sacrifice of two lines 
(334-5, including the valuable TVT86V a7To7Tp6 VEWV of 334a), we have a 
clear picture of normal Greek procedure: the bodies are burned and 
the ashes buried in a polyandrion on, or as near as possible to, the 
battlefield. It comes naturally from Nestor, who knows better than 
any of the others (except the usually silent Diomedes, who fought at 
Thebes, cf. 4.105-6, and the absent Achilles, cf. 6.418-20) the drill in 
these matters; but to most of his hearers, though not of course to 
Homer's own audience, this sort of thing is as new as it must have 
been to most of the men in the British 'New Armies' in 1915. However 
repugnant the task, the dead must be disposed of after a battle; and 

diSintegrators have used against the text of the Iliad. it is really surprising that no one should 
have suggested that this passage in particular (and indeed the whole of Aineias' appearances 
in the Iliad) might be a post-Virgilian interpolation. 

so Both Nestor's address to his men (a good example of how businesslike Nestor can be. 
when there is urgent business on hand) and the formation which he has adopted are further 
evidence that his contingent contains a considerable number of men not hardened for 
battle. 



J. A. DAVISON 21 

however shocking it may have been to the prejudices of the ordinary 
Bronze Age Achaean, for whom inhumation was normal, cremation 
in the Anatolian manner21 would be the only possible thing-there 
would not be any hope of providing each of them with a "stone 
tunic" in proper form. Besides, argues Nestor, if we cremate them, 
we can take the remains home with us when we go. But who will 
take the ashes and see that they reach the right destination? Nestor 
does not suggest that this should be done as a formal military opera­
tion ending with parades and speeches and burial in a state mau­
soleum; indeed his logic goes so far astray as almost to suggest that 
"each (of the dead) may take his bones back to his children." So 
comrades and relations are left with the painful duty,22 which will 
in any case be practically impossible to fulfil, since the mound is to 
be one and indistinguishable, and the individual's ashes will be 
unidentifiable, since even if there is a separate urn for each man it 
cannot be legibly marked [cf. 7.185]. The oddest thing however about 
this whole business is that this is not the first time, even in the Iliad, 
that the Achaeans have been faced with the problem of mass mor­
tality, and have solved it in a similar way, without any logic (good or 
bad) from Nestor or anyone else: look at 1.52, when the plague victims 
are quietly cremated in one hexameter. It is true that Homer often 
holds up what to us seem necessary explanations: so the M€VOlna811 
of 1.307 is not explicitly identified as Patroklos until 9.201-2, and we 
have to wait until 20.215-41 to learn the intricacies of the Trojan royal 
pedigree. Funeral arrangements may be another case of this, or it 
may be that battle casualties are on a different footing from deaths 
by plague; but I suspect that Nestor's argument in 7.334-5 was already 
in Homer's mind before he began to describe the quarrel in Book 1, 
or the plague which preceded it. 

Page points out that there is a certain resemblance between the 
procedure suggested by Nestor and that described by Thucydides in 
connection with Perikles' funeral speech [Th. 2.34]' So too Miss 
Lorimer, in her Homer and the Monuments (London 1950) 442-9, pointed 
out resemblances between the Trojan Supplicatio in 6.286-312 and the 

21 So the ritual for Patroklos' funeral in 23 seems to follow the pattern of that for a 
Hittite prince: M. Riemschneider, Die Welt der Hethiter (Stuttgart 1954) 78-9. 

22 Nestor does not seem to have brought home the ashes of Antilochos, nor Neoptolemos 
the mingled ashes of Achilles and Patroklos, nor Teukros the ashes of T elamonian Aias; it 
is therefore unlikely that anyone else had much thought or opportunity for such things 
when the time came to gather up the booty and sail for home. 



22 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE <ACHAEAN WALL' 

ritual of the great Panathenaia. These resemblances do indeed exist, 
but they should not be exaggerated, nor should it be forgotten that 
in a purely linear argument with two terms A and B the possibilities 
of logical connection may be diagrammatically expressed: A> B or 
B> A. It is thus legitimate for the student of the part played by 
Athens in the preservation and dissemination to suggest that apparent 
resemblances between Homeric and Attic usages are as likely to be 
due to Attic imitation of Homer as to 'Homeric' imitation of Athens: 
'Peisistratos' may have devised the peplos ritual and commissioned a 
seated statue of Athena after reading or hearing Iliad 6,23 and 'Kimon' 
may have been given the idea of bringing his men's ashes home from 
the North Aegean by Iliad 7. 

Page makes a good deal of play with what he calls "symptoms of 
relatively late and untraditional composition in this part of the Iliad" 
(HHI 339; see the whole of his note 35); but it does not seem that the 
points which he emphasizes contain any evidence which would com­
pel us to believe that this part of the poem is the work of Attic or 
other interpolators. It must be remembered that, if our Iliad was 
indeed composed in the latter years of the eighth century (as I am 
not alone in believing), it is likely to have contained a good many 
"relatively late" elements from the moment of its composition: 
from the end of Mycenaean IIIB24 to what Kirk calls "the date of 
monumental composition" [SH 287, cf. 316-7] and I should call "the 
date of Homer" at the end of the eighth century considerably more 
than five hundred years must have elapsed, giving plenty of time for 
the poetic language to develop and to evolve 'earlier' and 'later' 
forms. Kirk puts the point well (SH 203): "there is a strong case for 
assuming that a very large proportion of the forms identified as <late' 
by Chantraine and others ... are not post-Homeric, but are simply 
<late' in relation to the whole history of the oral tradition, near the 
end of which came the great monumental poems." It may be added 

23 I argued the point briefly but sufficiently in my review of Miss Lorimer's book (CR NS 

2 [1952] 15). The linguistic arguments based on Wackernagel, purporting to show the 
irreversibility of the supposed Attic influence on Homer, have been mainly demolished 
by the decipherment of Linear B; of the remainder, that based on the -110-> -€W- meta­
thesis ought not to have survived the first publication of the inscription on Nikandre's 
dedication at Delos, with JEINOJIKRO for the choriambic J€LJl03lK€W and AARON for 
the spondaic llilwJl-for this inscription, see now L. H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic 
Greece (Oxford 1961) 291,411 (transcription), PI. 55.2 (photograph and tracing). 

24 For this, see now P. Alin, Das Ende der mykenischen Fundstittten auf dem griechischen 
Fest/and (Lund 1962) and V. R. O'A. Oesborough, The Last Mycenaeans and their Successors 
(Oxford 1964). 



J. A. DAVISON 23 

that it is at least possible that the remaining forms would look less 
strange than they do if we had more evidence about the lang­
uage actually used by pre-Homeric (pre-monumental) narrative 
poets. 

Bur, though I almost hesitate to mention it because of its apparently 
unrelieved mechanicism, there is one piece of evidence which suggests 
that our Iliad was, as the literary critics have always held, deliberately 
designed, and that the poem as composed to that design has not in 
fact suffered any large-scale interference whether by interpolation or 
by excision.25 The Oxford text of the Iliad contains 15,683 lines, dis­
tributed into twenty-four <books' of very different lengths, from the 
909 lines of Book 5 to the 424 of Book 19. If however these twenty-four 
books are divided into six groups of four, the groups are found to be 
surprisingly similar in length, and to compare even better with the 
average (one-sixth of 15,683 = almost exactly 2,614). 

Relation to Average 
Group Books Lines Longer: Shorter 

1 1-4 2493 121 
2 5-8 2481 133 

3 9-12 2606 8 
4 13-16 2972 358 
5 17-20 2304 310 
6 21-24 2827 213 

If it is further assumed (as I think there is some evidence that we 
might not be far wrong in assuming) that a reasonable speed for the 

25 It is necessary to emphasize the limitation of the argument to "large-scale interpola­
tion" and to define this term. Most of the interpolations pointed out by Bolling, and 
rejected from his Ilias Atheniensium (above, n.2) as not having formed part of the "pana­
thenaic" Iliad, are too short and too widely distributed to affect the relationship between 
books Significantly: but 7, which would lose 73 lines (not to mention the consequential 
losses to other books, notably 12, which would be entailed by the loss of the "Building of 
the Wall"), and 18, which would lose 159 lines, would be seriously shortened. What the 
argument in the text does exclude without any question is any suggestion that whole books 
(such as 9 or 10) could be post-Homeric interpolations. On the general question of length, 
readers may perhaps be reminded that the Odyssey is about one-fifth shorter than the Iliad 
(12,110 lines) and that Odysseus breaks off his narrative in Od. 11.330 after the equivalent of 
1,470 hexameters; being adjured to go on, he then continues for a further 714 lines (or, at 
about eleven lines to the minute, approXimately 3h.20m. actual narration, with a short 
break for general conversation just after two-thirds of the whole story). This was an 
exceptional effort, no doubt, to an exceptionally receptive audience (cf ad. 11.335, 13.2); 
but it gives some idea of what, in the author's opinion, an after-dinner audience might be 
prepared to stand-and that too on top of De mod ok os' song summarized in ad. 8.500-20. 



24 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

public recitation of Greek hexameters to a continuing audience is 
about eleven lines a minute,26 these figures become even more 
significant: 

Group Lines Time required 27 

1 2493 3h.47m. 
2 2481 3h.46m. 
3 2606 3h.57m. 
4 2972 4h.31m. 
5 2304 3h.30m. 
6 2827 4h.18m. 

I therefore suggest that the man who designed the Iliad (and by that 
I mean Homer) did so deliberately, with the intention that it should 
be recited to a festival audience over a period of three days, with two 
sessions each day, by a team of four reciters, each of whom was to 

recite one 'book' in each session. If the four reciters appeared at each 
session in the same order, their tasks would differ in weight, but this 
difference might well be significant. 

Books and lines Total 
Reciter Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Lines 

A 1+5 9+ 13 17+21 
611 909 709 837 761 611 4438 

B 2+6 10+ 14 18+22 
877 529 579 522 616 515 3638 

C 3+7 11+ 15 19+23 
461 482 847 746 424 897 3857 

D 4+8 12+ 16 20+24 
544 561 471 867 503 804 3750 

26 See my "Bebenaia 1: Experiment at Tiibingen" (CR NS 14 [1964] 14). In arriving at the 
figure here suggested, I have made two allowances: (1) the Tiibingen audience being small 
and qUietly attentive, I have accepted the suggestion of Dr T. J. Kakridis (who was also 
present at the readings) that the original rate of reciting should be supposed to be con­
siderably slower, since the audience would not only have been larger but have been com­
posed of Greeks, whose reactions might be expected to be less inhibited; (2) on the other 
side I have allowed for two factors which would contribute to increase the speed some­
what: (a) that the Homeric team would be reciting from memory, not reading from text; 
(b) that the Homeric team would have experience of the conditions prevailing at a narra­
tive recitation. 

27 These times, which are taken to the nearest minute, do not allow for intermissions, 
but it will be seen that, allOWing for intervals of ten minutes each between books, even the 
longest session would require just over five hours (less than a Covent Garden performance 
of The Mastersingers), and that in the afternoon, when the timetable would be more flexible. 



J. A. DAVISON 25 

The longest single day is thus C's (Day 2: 1593 lines), but to make up 
for this he also has the shortest (Day 1: 943), and his 1321 lines on Day 
3 keeps him well below A. I should guess that C was the least experi­
enced member of the team: his part is well calculated to let him gain 
confidence and experience, and his material is mostly straightfor­
ward, ending with the bravura of the games. Next in ascending order 
of experience I should put B: numerically Day 1 is his biggest day, 
but on Day 2 he has Hektor and Andromache (6) and on Day 3 

Achilles and Hektor (22), both dramatically important episodes; he 
needs a good memory, too, with the catalogue in 2 and the shield in 
18. A is clearly the strong man of the team: fully experienced, he can 
open the sessions; in good health, he can carry far the heaviest load of 
lines; and his material includes such important episodes as the quarrel 
(1), Diomedes' aristeia (5), the embassy (9), the fight at the ships (13), 
the fighting over Patroklos (17) and the battle by the river (21). D, I 
suspect, was the author himself: though he has not kept all the <fat' 
for himself, and does not altogether shirk the exertion of a long 
recitation (16 and 24 are both above the average length), it is noticeable 
that his main efforts come at the end of the day, and that with the 
breach of the truce in 4, the fight at the wall in 12, the killing of 
Patroklos in 16, the theomachy in 20 and the ransoming of Hektor 
in 24 he has opportunities for displaying his skill and experience.28 It 
should not be forgotten, either, that if D was the author the whole 
direction of the performance would have to be done by him, includ­
ing probably the prompting. 

This is a part of the case for design which the believers in large­
scale interpolation have never yet, to my knowledge, had to meet. 
Kirk himself [cf SH 263-5] is not more sceptical about <geometrical' 
correspondences in the Iliad than I am;29 but arithmetical relation­
ships of the sort described above seem to me to be on a different 
footing, because an inborn sense of scale is, after all, one of the 
necessary qualifications for an artist, and the arithmetical relation­
ships which the Iliad suggests are neither so close nor so rigid as to 
inhibit the play of the artist's emotions. Indeed, though I would not 
be understood as implying that considerations of numerical, and above 
all temporal, relations such as I have attempted to demonstrate above 

28 The importance of Book 8 is shown by the attention which Karl Reinhardt paid to it in 
his Die llias und ihr Dichter (ed. U. Holscher [Gottingen 1961] 138-211). 

29 Cf my review of T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer and C. H. Whitman, Homer 
and the Heroic Tradition (CR NS 9 [1959] 231). 



26 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

could have been consciously present to Homer's mind when he was 
composing his Wrath of Achilles, Reinhardt in his posthumous Die 
Ilias und ihr Dichter (above, note 28) was able to give many examples 
of passages in which, as it seemed to him, the poet was revising him­
self-and it is at least possible that one of the motives for such revision 
might be the wish to improve the relative scale of different episodes. 
In the song school of which the man whom they called Homeros was 
ex hypothesi the head, even the master's works must have run the 
gauntlet of criticism by his senior pupils and potential successors; and 
that criticism may have turned as much on problems of public 
relations as on those of narrative consistency or verbal felicity. The 
Iliad was, for anything we know to the contrary, the first (and also 
very nearly the last)30 Greek narrative poem on a truly 'monumental' 
scale to be constructed according to what mediaeval critics called the 
ordo artificialis; its first public performance might fairly be expected 
by those who were to be concerned in the occasion, whether as per­
formers or simply as members of the school, to be an event of great 
professional importance, and it is reasonable to suppose that there 
was long and anxious discussion between the author and his intended 
reciters about problems of organization and distribution. It does not 
therefore seem to me entirely fanciful to suppose that Homer pro­
duced several oral versions, whether full-length or in the form of more 
or less extended synopses, before he and his amanuenses (were they 
the three other members of the team?) set to work on the produc­
tion of a 'stabilized' text in writing. This stabilized text was not, of 
course, intended for publication in anything like the modern sense of 
the word; it was not intended that there should be more than one 
copy, and that copy would be the author's property, to be kept in the 
school, or perhaps to be given as a valuable asset to some individual 
upon a special occasion.31 Whether this copy was written on prepared 
skins (oupOlpaL) or on papyrus rolls imported from Egypt via Byblos, 
the text need not have been much more bulky than the book-texts 
of Roman Imperial times; the writing may have been larger and less 
tidy than the best bookhands of later times, but there was probably 
more economy in the use of the material (smaller margins and the 

39 Its only serious competitor is the Odyssey; and I do not think that anyone who has 
worked through both poems with really close attention to questions of structure would 
argue that the Odyssey shows a poetical technique nearly so complex as that of the Iliad. 

31 Cf the story. already it seems known to Pindar (fr. 265 Sne1l 3). that Homer gave his 
daughter the Cypria as her dowry (the authority is Ael. VH 9.15). 



J. A. DAVISON 27 

like), and the supposed difficulties of transport, at which Page has 
poked a little fun (Antiquity 36 [1962] 310: "carried about in carts"), 
would not be likely to arise often, if at all. There is no evidence that 
the author of the Iliad ever surrendered his copy of the poem to any­
one else in his lifetime, and he may well have gone on tinkering at it 
himself for years. The reflection that "a work of art is never finished" 
is sometimes ascribed to Paul Valery, but he was not the first to act 
on it; and Homeric critics have obviously felt the same about the 
Iliad-they have been trying for millennia (since the time of Zoilos, 
at least) and are still trying, poor fellows, to rewrite it-but without 
success. 

It may thus fairly be claimed that there is no evidence in Thucy­
dides for the proposition that Homer's text of the Iliad underwent 
large-scale interpolation after its author's death, and that there is 
even less evidence in other authors for this proposition than can be 
marshalled against it. If, as Kirk thinks [HPH 9, 32] the Doloneia (Book 
10) is an interpolation of the period between the "first monumental 
composition" in the late eighth century and the reorganization of the 
Panathenaic competitions by <Hipparchus' about 530 B.C., the Doloneia 
as we have it must, in my judgement, have superseded something of 
about the same length and of not altogether dissimilar content.32 

Our Book 10 may be an "afterthought," but it has not yet been proved 
that the afterthought was anyone but Homer's; the onus of proof is 
on those who seek to athetize it, and that onus they have not yet 
successfully discharged. It is understandable that, after all that the 
Analytiker have written in the last three hundred years, professional 
students of Homer are chary of proclaiming belief in the unity and 
substantial integrity of our Iliad; but what the Iliad needs now is not 
so much disintegrating analysis as understanding.33 

ADDENDUM 

I had already completed the foregoing and submitted it to a journal 
for publication before I saw Professor J. A. Notopoulos' "Studies in 

32 This is not the place to argue the point; but the despondency of the Achaean leaders 
at the end of Book 9, though slightly less than at the beginning of the book (i.e. at the end 
of Book 8) seems to need some kind of success, on however small a scale, to put them (and 
the troops) in good heart for the next day's fighting. This the Doloneia supplies, and at the 
same time foreshadows the less active role to be played by Nestor from the middle of 11 
onwards. 

33 Cf U. Friedlander, de Zoilo aliisque Homeri obtrectatoribus (Diss. Konigsberg 1895) 48: 
nemo ve/im obliviscatur, scholiorum non esse, Homerum vituperare, sed explicare. 



28 THUCYDIDES, HOMER AND THE 'ACHAEAN WALL' 

Early Greek Oral Poetry" (HSCP 68 [1964] 1-77). Most of the points on 
which he and I agree and disagree will be plain to anyone who reads 
both papers, but two things seem to me to need emphasizing: 

(1) I have never been able to accept the view, which is fundamental 
to Notopoulos' argument, that the evident analogies between Yugo­
slav heroic song and the KAla av8pwv of Iliad 9 and Odyssey 8 can be so 
extrapolated as to cover the Iliad and Odyssey. Above all, I do not 
believe that Homer composed either poem to be sung to a musical 
accompaniment; everything that we are told about the activities of 
rhapsodes is based on the belief that these men recited other men's 
poems without musical accompaniment, and it is my belief that 
Homer's school invented both monumental epic poetry and the 
specialized activity of the rhapsode as a response to the introduction 
of the alphabet and the coming of literacy. Notopoulos' calculations 
(3-12) thus seem to me entirely irrelevant to the Iliad or Odyssey. 

(2) In his discussion of the relative dating of Arktinos et al., Hesiod 
and Homer (37-40), Notopoulos is guilty of a chronological fallacy: he 
accepts the traditional dates for Arktinos and the rest, while dating 
Homer and Hesiod on the lower chronology preferred by modern 
scholars (± 700); he should either give traditional dates all round, 
with Homer and Hesiod ± 830 (Hdt. 2.53.3) or stick to the modern 
dating-which knows nothing of Arktinos and co. at all! 

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS