ABSTRACT
Of all the deeds that were committed by the Greeks during the sack of Troy, none was considered more shameful than the lesser Aias’ act of sacrilege in seizing Kassandra from her place of sanctuary in the temple of Athena, and even raping her by the altar in some accounts. In the earliest recorded version, from the Sack of Troy in the epic cycle, he dragged her away as she was trying to cling to the cultic image of the goddess, and his fellow Greeks were so appalled by his behaviour that they would have stoned him if he had not taken refuge at the altar of Athena (apparently the one that he had violated!). The summary of this lost epic concludes with the ominous statement that the goddess planned to bring disaster to the Greeks on the high seas, presumably because they had failed to avenge the sacrilege.1 The resulting theme of the wrath of Athena is already in evidence in Nestor’s account of the Greek returns in the Odyssey, and it was central to the plot of the Returns as has been noted. As it happens, neither the Odyssey nor the surviving testimonies on the Returns make any explicit mention of the cause of the goddess’s anger, but it can be assumed that Aias’ sacrilege was to blame, as was certainly indicated in the Sack of Troy and commonly accepted in the subsequent tradition.
