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