The burial of Oedipous at Colonus, the topic of the noble tragedy of Sophocles, is, poetry apart, mere body-snatching. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,[14] and even Hesiod,[15] know nothing of a sepulchral connection of Oedipous with Athens. Oedipous's funeral feast was held at Thebes. These sepulchral connections of Athens with the tale of Thebes are necessarily un-Homeric, for they are based on the very fanaticism of hero-worship, and fall into line with the craze of historic Greece for securing the relics of heroes, who will defend a city if duly propitiated. Remote Aetolia is far more closely connected with the Tales of Thebes and of Troy than is Athens. For some reason, then, Athens, and with her the Ionians, is "not of the centre," is out of the central legends, and her efforts to attach herself to them are late, and are wholly un-Homeric. Naturally the really old Epic poets knew nothing of these Ionian pretensions, which are the work of Ionian Burkes tampering with the Homeric "Peerage." Athens wished to "have it both ways," to appear as a city that had always been held by the same race,[16] that stood apart, and had been the asylum of exiles from the rest of Greece; and also as a city that took a great part in the legendary history of the rest of Greece, whose traditions did not recognise her share. Thus it seems probable that Attica was the seat of a people standing somewhat apart, and possessing an older stratum of inhabitants than the makers of Achaean saga. But Athens and the Ionians were not content with this respectable antiquity. The Ionians of Asia, first, in the Cyclic poems (750-600 B.C.) tried to prove that they and neighbouring and friendly peoples had their share in the Trojan war; and, next, the tragedians of Athens carried on this pseudo-tradition in regard to Thebes as well as to Troy. Their versions led the world captive for 2000 years. The oldest indications of the Ionian attempts to connect heroes of Athens and of her neighbours and friends with the Trojan affair are to be read in the fragments and summaries of the Cyclic poems. Next, we find this cause taken up by the Athenian tragedians; and, lastly, we find in later sources the fables which the tragedians handled with poetic freedom; while, in the pseudo-Dictys of Crete, we have legends derived from the Cyclic poets, from other sources, and from the author's own fancy. The Roman poets, like Virgil, also reflect the Ionian and Athenian traditions, and their hostility to Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, and Diomede, with their partiality for Aias, claimed as a neighbour of Athens, and for the ill-used Philoctetes, and the martyr sage, Palamedes of Nauplia. Homer mentions neither him nor his city.[17] [1] xi. 321-325. [2] Leaf, Note to _Iliad_, iii. 144. [3] Monro, _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 370. [4] Roscher's _Lexikon_, under "Minos." [5] See Miss Harrison's _Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens_, London, 1890.