The present Ilians further tell us that the city was, in fact, not completely wiped out at its capture by the Achaeans and that it was never even deserted. At any rate the Locrian maidens, beginning a little later, were sent every year.1 But this too is non-Homeric, for Homer knows not of the violation of Cassandra, but he says that she was a maiden at about that time,“for he2 slew Othryoneus, a sojourner in Troy from Cabesus, who had but recently come, following after the rumor of war,3 and he was asking Cassandra in marriage, the comeliest of the daughters of Priam, without gifts of wooing,
”4 and yet he does not so much as mention any violation of her or say that the destruction of Aias in the shipwreck took place because of the wrath of Athena or any such cause; instead, he speaks of Aias as "hated by Athena,"5 in accordance with her general hatred (for since they one and all committed sacrilege against her temple, she was angry at them all), but says that he was destroyed by Poseidon because of his boastful speech.6 But the fact is that the Locrian maidens were first sent when the Persians were already in power.
