ABSTRACT
That city appears to have been unlucky from the start, for it has little place in the Iliad or the Odyssey. The few mentions of it are generally interpolations, but it was late in interesting itself in the Trojan story, and, by that time, the form of the epic was too well-established to permit of serious change. It has little place in the other so-called 'Homeric' writings, or in an epic like the T hebaid. All this literature had been concerned with Panhellenic activities, while the Athenian heroes had no great part to play outside their own city. Perhaps this was why they were unable to make so much out of even their own mythical material as was achieved in the case of some other cities. Their narratives of Theseus contain too little of real tradition, and this is submerged under a mass of wild mythologising. The great tragedians dealt with Pan-hellenic heroes and only at moments succeeded in connecting them with Athens. Some other places fared better at the beginning of the story, and, since there were no records here for a long time, the earliest historians of the city had to fabricate what they could out of unreliable material.
