Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/360

 328 HISTORY OF GREECE. nental possessions) of Tenedos (southward of Sigeium) to th boundaries of Dardanus, which had its own title to legendary reverence as the special sovereignty of JEneas. The inhabitants of Sigeium could not peaceably acquiesce in this loss of their autonomy, and their city was destroyed by the Ilieans. The dignity and power of Ilium being thus prodigiously en- hanced, we cannot doubt that the inhabitants assumed to them- selves exaggerated importance as the recognized parents of all- conquering Rome. Partly, we may naturally suppose, from the jealousies thus aroused on the part of their neighbors at Skepsis and Alexandreia Troas partly from the pronounced tendency of the age (in which Krates at Pergamus and Aristarchus at Alexandria divided between them the palm of literary celebrity) towards criticism and illustration of the old poets a blow was now aimed at the mythical legitimacy of Ilium. Demetrius of Skepsis, one of the most laborious of the Homeric critics, had composed thirty books of comment upon the Catalogue in the Iliad : Hestiaea, an authoress of Alexandreia Troas, had written on the same subject: both of them, well-acquainted with the locality, remarked that the vast battles described in the Iliad could not be packed into the narrow space between Ilium and the Naustathmon of the Greeks ; the more so, as that space, too small even as it then stood, had been considerably enlarged since the date of the Iliad by deposits at the mouth of the Skaman- der. 1 They found no difficulty in pointing out topographical in- congruities and impossibilities as to the incidents in the Iliad, which they professed to remove by the startling theory that the Homeric Ilium had not occupied the site of the city so called. There was a village, called the village of the Ilieans, situated 1 Strabo, xiii. 599. Hapari^riffc 6e 6 Arj[j.f}Tpio( Kal TT)V ' A.he!;av6pivj}v *E<m- aiav fiupTvpa, TT/V avyjpa-^aaav nepl TTJ^ 'Qpjpov 'ITiiutiof, nw&avo/j.fvrjv, el nepl TT/V vvv itoh.iv 6 7r63e//of aweary, KOL rb Tpu'inbv Ttidiov TTOV EOTIV, b fie- rav TTJC ToAeuf KOI rf/f -&ah,daar]<; 6 Trot^rfo Qpufct rb (J.EV ydp irpb TJJI; vvv TroAeof dpufievov, Trpo%u[ia. elvai TUV iroTa/tuv, varepov yeyovof. The words TTOV lariv are introduced conjecturally by Grosskurd, the ex cellent German translator of Strabo, but they seem to me necessary to make the sense complete. Hesittea is cited more than once in the Homeric Scholia (Schol. Venet ad Diad. iii. 64 ; Enstath. ad Iliad, ii. 538).