right to be sceptical, nor to content ourselves with an
inspection of a town to the exclusion of a consideration of its power;
but we may safely conclude that the armament in question surpassed
all before it, as it fell short of modern efforts; if we can here also
accept the testimony of Homer's poems, in which, without allowing for
the exaggeration which a poet would feel himself licensed to employ, we
can see that it was far from equalling ours. He has represented it as
consisting of twelve hundred vessels; the Boeotian complement of each
ship being a hundred and twenty men, that of the ships of Philoctetes
fifty. By this, I conceive, he meant to convey the maximum and the
minimum complement: at any rate, he does not specify the amount of any
others in his catalogue of the ships. That they were all rowers as well
as warriors we see from his account of the ships of Philoctetes, in
which all the men at the oar are bowmen. Now it is improbable that
many supernumeraries sailed, if we except the kings and high officers;
especially as they had to cross the open sea with munitions of war,
in ships, moreover, that had no decks, but were equipped in the old
piratical fashion. So that if we strike the average of the largest
and smallest ships, the number of those who sailed will appear
inconsiderable, representing, as they did, the whole force of Hellas.
And this was due not so much to scarcity of men as of money. Difficulty
of subsistence made the invaders reduce the numbers of the army to a
point at which it might live on the country during the prosecution of
the war. Even after the victory they obtained on their arrival--and a
victory there must have been, or the fortifications of the naval camp
could never have been built--there is no indication of their whole
force having been employed; on the contrary, they seem to have turned to
cultivation of the Chersonese and to piracy from want of supplies. This
was what really enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years
against them; the dispersion of the enemy making them always a match for
the detachment left behind. If they had brought plenty of supplies with
them, and had persevered in the war without scattering for piracy and
agriculture, they would have easily defeated the Trojans in the field,
since they could hold their own against them with the division on
service. In short, if they had stuck to the siege, the capture of Troy
would have cost them less time and less tr