148 HISTORY OF GREECE. both of the Tegeans and of Pausanias in the past historical real- ity of this romantic adventure. Strabo indeed tries to transform the romance into something which has the outward semblance of history, by remarking that the quarrel respecting the boar's head and hide cannot have been the real cause of war between the Kuretes and the .ZEtolians ; the true ground of dispute (he con- tends) was probably the possession of a portion of territory. 1 His remarks on this head are analogous to those of Thucydides and other critics, when they ascribe the Trojan war, not to the rape of Helen, but to views of conquest or political apprehensions. But he treats the general fact of the battle between the Kuretes and the .ZEtolians, mentioned in the Iliad, as something unquestiona- bly real and historical recapitulating at the same time a va- riety of discrepancies on the part of different authors, but not giving any decision of his own respecting their truth or false- hood. In the same manner as Atalanta was intruded into the Kaly- donian hunt, so also she seems to have been introduced into the memorable funeral games celebrated after the decease of Pelias at I61ko3> in which she had no place at the time when the works on the chest of Kypselus were executed.2 But her native and genuine locality is Arcadia ; where her race-course, near to the town of Methydrion, was shown even in the days of Pausanias. 3 This race-course had been the scene of destruction for more than broken in the voyage from Greece : the other was kept in the temple of Bac- chus in the Imperial Gardens. It is numbered among the memorable exploits of Theseus that he van quished and killed a formidable and gigantic sow, in the territory of Krom- myon near Corinth. According to some critics, this Krommyonian sow waa the mother of the Kalydonian boar (Strabo, viii. p. 380). 1 Strabo, x. p. 466. Ho/le/zou d' iftTrecrovTOf role Qeariutiaic irpbf ( ivea Kal Me^faypew, 6 [tev TloiTjTfc, afifyl ovbf Kepal.ij not depfiari, Karti rfjv irepl TOV Kcnrpov fiv&o"koyiav uf <5e rb elicbf, nepl ftepovf ryq X^P a S> etc. This remark is also similar to Mr. Payne Knight's criticism on the true causes of the Trojan war, which were (he tells us) of a political character, independent of Helen and her abduction (Prolegom. ad Homer, c. 53). 1 Compare Apollodor. iii. 9, 2, and Pausan. v. 17, 4. She is made to wrestle with Peleus at these funeral games, which seems foreign to her char- acter. 3 Paasan. viii. 35, 8.
