they occupy two-fifths of Peloponnese and lead the whole, not to speak
of their numerous allies without. Still, as the city is neither
built in a compact form nor adorned with magnificent temples and
public edifices, but composed of villages after the old fashion of
Hellas, there would be an impression of inadequacy. Whereas, if Athens
were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any inference
from the appearance presented to the eye would make her power to
have been twice as great as it is. We have therefore no 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 trouble. But
as want of money proved the weakness of earlier expeditions, so from
the same cause even the one in question, more famous than its
predecessors, may be pronounced on the evidence of what it effected to
have been inferior to its renown and to the current opinion about it
formed under the tuition of the poets.
Even after the Trojan War, Hellas was still engaged in removing
and settling, and thus could not attain to the quiet which must
precede growth. The late return of the Hellenes from Ilium caused many
revolutions, and factions ensued almost everywhere; and it was the
citizens thus driven into exile who founded the cities. Sixty years
after the capture of Ilium, the modern Boeotians were driven out of
Arne by the Thessalians, and settled in the present Boeotia, the
former Cadmeis; though there was a division of them there before, some
of whom joined the expedition to Ilium. Twenty years later, the
Dorians and the Heraclids became masters of Peloponnese; so that
much had to be done and many years had to elapse before Hellas could
attain to a durable tranquillity undisturbed by removals, and could
begin to send out colonies, as Athens did to Ionia and most of the
islands, and the Peloponnesians to most of Italy and Sicily and some