Abstract:

Iliad’s ancient commentators replaced the Homeric dichotomy “Achaeans vs. Trojans” with “Greeks vs. Barbarians”. Modern scholars no longer call the Trojans ‘barbarians’; but they usually oppose Trojans and ‘Greeks’, dispensing with the original denominations of Achaeans, Danaans, etc. This distortion is not innocuous: it assumes without discussion that the Iliad’s ancient audiences experienced a special affinity for one side and identified it with “our side”. It is not impossible that this feeling existed at times; but it is abusive to interpret it in an ethnic, national or ‘patriotic’ sense. However, this is what the Scholia usually do, seriously distorting, in many cases, the original text.