History of the Peloponnesian War

And because Mycenae was only a small place, or if any particular town of that time seems now to be insignificant, it would not be right for me to treat this as an exact piece of evidence and refuse to believe that the expedition against Troy was as great as the poets have asserted and as tradition still maintains.

For if the city of the Lacedaemonians should be deserted, and nothing should be left of it but its temples and the foundations of its other buildings, posterity would, I think, after a long lapse of time, be very loath to believe that their power was as great as their renown. (And yet they occupy two-fifths of the Peloponnesus and have the hegemony of the whole, as well as of tleir many allies outside ; but still, as Sparta is not compactly built as a city and has not provided itself with costly temples and other edifices, but is inhabited village-fashion in the old Hellenic style, its power would appear less than it is.) Whereas, if Athens should suffer the same fate, its power would, I think, from what appeared of the city s ruins, be conjectured double what it is.

The reasonable course, therefore, is not to be incredulous or to regard the appearance of cities rather than their power, but to believe that expedition to have been greater than any that preceded it, though falling below those of the present time, if here again one may put any trust in the poetry of Homer; for though it is natural to suppose that he as a poet adorned and magnified the expedition, still even on his showing it was evidently comparatively small.

For in the fleet of twelve hundred vessels he has represented the ships of the Boeotians as having one hundred and twenty men each, and those of Philoctetes as having fifty,[*](Hom. B 510, 719.) indicating, it seems to me, the largest and the smallest ships; at any rate, no mention as to the size of any others is made in the Catalogue of Ships. But that all on board were at once rowers and fighting men he has shown in the case of the ships of Philoctetes; for he represents all the oarsmen as archers. And it is not likely that many supernumeraries sailed with the expedition, apart from the kings and those highest in office, especially as they were to cross the open sea with all the equipment of war, and, furthermore, had boats which were not provided with decks, but were built after the early style, more like pirate-boats.

In any event, if one takes the mean between the largest ships and the smallest, it is clear that not a large number of men went on the expedition, considering that they were sent out from all Hellas in common.[*](The number would be 102,000, i.e. 1,200 ships at 85 men each.)