The Center for Hellenic Studies Our Campus and Library Making
and Unmaking: The Achaean Wall and the Limits of Fictionality in
Homeric Criticism Αὐτὸ μὲν γὰρ διὰ τὴν τοῦ ποιητοῦ λογιότητα ἐκ
μὴ ὄντος ἐστὶ τρόπον τινά, ἡ δὲ ἀληθὴς Τροία τῇ τοῦ χρόνου φορᾷ
ἐκ τοῦ ὄντος ἦλθεν εἰς τὸ μηδέν, ἀφανισθεῖσα. Thanks to the
poet’s eloquence, the Achaean Wall in some way is, having
emerged out of nothing, while the real Troy, which formerly was,
in the course of time came to naught, having vanished.
Eustathius ad VII 452 How to Make Something from Nothing The
Achaean Wall troubled Homer’s ancient readers from Thucydides to
the Homeric scholia and later antiquity, just as it has troubled
his modern readers. Ancients and moderns alike have been drawn
to the incongruousness of the detail, both its tardiness in the
plot but also the very fact of the wall itself, which is
disorienting in the extreme. As Strabo complains, why build the
wall now, in the tenth year of the War?—this is a sign of
witlessness, of ἀπόνοια, both the