In the former passage we find Odysseus stationed next to the Athenians. But Odysseus would have neighbours on either hand. In the second passage we find the Athenians stationed next to the Boeotians and Ionians, but the Athenians, too, had neighbours on either side. The arrangement was, on the Achaean extreme left, Protesilaus's command (he was dead), and that of Aias; then the Boeotians and Ionians, with "the picked men of the Athenians"; and then Odysseus, on the Boeotolono-Athenian right; or so the Athenians would read the passage. The texts must have seemed favourable to the fraudulent Athenian interpolator denounced by the Megarians, or he would have altered them. Mr. Leaf, however, argues that line 558 of Book II. "cannot be original, as is patent from the fact that Aias in the rest of the _Iliad_ is not encamped next the Athenians" (see IV. 327; XIII. 681). The Megarians do not seem to have seen it, or they would have cited these passages. But why argue at all about the Megarian story if it be a fiction? Mr. Leaf takes the brief bald mention of Aias in _Iliad_, II. 558 as "a mocking cry from Athens over the conquest of the island of the Aiakidai." But as, in this same _Catalogue_, Aias is styled "by far the best of warriors" after Achilles (II. 768), while there is no more honourable mention made of Diomede than that he had "a loud war cry" (II. 568), or of Menelaus but that he was also sonorous, and while Nestor, the ancestor of Pisistratus, receives not even that amount of praise (line 601), "the mocking cry from Athens" appears a vain imagination.] The lines disputed by the Megarians occur in the _Catalogue_, and, as to the date and original purpose of the _Catalogue_, the most various opinions prevail. In Mr. Leaf's earlier edition of the _Iliad_ (vol. i. p. 37), he says that "nothing convincing has been urged to show" that the _Catalogue_ is "of late origin." We know, from the story of Solon and the Megarians, that the _Catalogue_ "was considered a classical work--the Domesday Book of Greece, at a very early date"--say 600-580 B.C. "It agrees with the poems in being pre-Dorian" (except in lines 653-670). "There seems therefore to be no valid reason for doubting that it, like the bulk of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, was composed in Achaean times, and carried with the emigrants to the coast of Asia Minor...." In his new edition (vol. ii. p. 86), Mr. Leaf concludes that the _Catalogue_ "originally formed an introduction to the whole Cycle," the compiling of "the whole Cycle" being of uncertain date, but very late indeed, on any theory. The author "studiously preserves an ante-Dorian standpoint. It is admitted that there can be little doubt that some of the material, at least, is old."