ourselves, this is not the part of the story which would have first
staggered us. The immediate cause may be very trifling that brings two
angry rivals into conflict, and, the war once commenced, they fight on
for victory; the first object of the strife is forgotten in the strife
itself, and each opponent thinks only how to destroy his enemy.
Herodotus, however, had heard another account from the priests of Egypt,
which made him still more disposed to dispute the popular tradition.
According to this account, Helen was in fact detained in Egypt during
the whole term of the siege. Paris, it seems, in sailing from Sparta,
had been driven thither by a storm; and the king of Egypt, hearing of
the wrong he had committed towards Menelaus, had sent him out of the
country, and detained Helen till her lawful husband should appear to
claim her. The misfortune was, that when the Greeks before Troy demanded
Helen, and were told that she neither was, nor had been in the town,
they would not believe the story, but continued to thunder at the gates.
"For if Helen had really been in Troy," says Herodotus, "she would
certainly have been given up, even if she had been mistress of Priam
himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family and all
his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and
irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her; their
misfortune was, that while they did not possess, and therefore could not
restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks that
such was the fact."

Pausanias, a reasoning man, starts at the Trojan horse: he converts it
into a battering-ram, as he cannot believe the Trojans to have been
deceived by so childish a trick.

Thucydides, a man who knew something of campaigning, is astonished at
the length of the siege; and perhaps his patriotism was put a little to
the blush at the idea that the assembled forces of Greece should be
occupied ten years before a town of very inconsiderable magnitude; for
no town of Ilium, we may remark in passing, ever existed that could
present a worthy object of attack to so great a power, or was at all
commensurate with the vast enterprise said to have been directed against
it. He concluded, therefore, without hesitation, "that the Greeks were
less numerous than the poets have represented, and that being, moreover,
very poor, they were unable to procure adequate and constant provisions:
hence they were compelled to disp