The Historians' History of the World 03

The fleet at length had a prosperous voyage. It consisted of about twelve hundred open vessels, each carrying from fifty to a hundred and twenty men. The number of men in the whole armament, computed from the mean of those two numbers mentioned by Homer as the complement of different ships, would be something more than a hundred thousand; and Thucydides, whose opinion is of the highest authority, has reckoned this within the bounds of probability; though a poet, he adds, would go to the utmost of current reports. The army, landing on the Trojan coast, was immediately so superior to the enemy as to oblige them to seek shelter within the city walls: but here the operations were at a stand. The hazards to which unfortified and solitary dwellings were exposed from pirates and freebooters had driven the more peaceable of mankind to assemble in towns for mutual security. To erect lofty walls around those towns for defence was then an obvious resource, requiring little more than labour for the execution. More thought, more art, more experience were necessary for forcing the rudest fortification, if defended with vigilance and courage. But the Trojan walls were singularly strong: Agamemnon’s army could make no impression upon them. He was therefore reduced to the method most common for ages after, of turning the siege into a blockade, and patiently waiting till want of necessaries should force the enemy to quit their shelter. But neither did the policy of the times amount by many degrees to the art of subsisting so numerous an army for any length of time, nor would the revenues of Greece have been equal to it with more knowledge, nor indeed would the state of things have admitted it, scarcely with any wealth, or by any means. For in countries without commerce, the people providing for their own wants only, supplies cannot be found equal to the maintenance of a superadded army. No sooner therefore did the Trojans shut themselves within their walls than the Greeks were obliged to give their principal attention to the means of subsisting their numerous forces. The common method of the times was to ravage the adjacent countries; and this was immediately put in practice. But such a resource soon destroys itself. To have therefore a more permanent and certain supply, a part of their army was sent to cultivate the vales of the Thracian Chersonesus, then abandoned by the inhabitants on account of the frequent and destructive incursions of the wild people who occupied the interior of that continent.

Large bodies being thus detached from the army, the remainder scarcely sufficed to deter the Trojans from taking the field again, and could not prevent succour and supplies from being carried into the town. Thus the siege was protracted to the enormous length of ten years. It was probably their success in marauding marches and pirating voyages that induced the Greeks to persevere so long. Achilles is said to have plundered no less than twelve maritime and eleven inland towns. Lesbos, then under the dominion of the monarch of Troy, was among his conquests; and the women of that island were apportioned to the victorious army as a part of the booty. But these circumstances alarming all neighbouring people contributed to procure numerous and powerful allies to the Trojans. Not only the Asiatic states, to a great extent eastward and southward, sent auxiliary troops, but also the European, westward, as far as the Pæonians of that country about the river Axius, which afterwards became Macedonia.

At length, in the tenth year of the war, after great exertions of valour and the slaughter of numbers on both sides, among whom were many of the highest rank, Troy yielded to its fate. Yet was it not then overcome by open force; stratagem is reported by Homer; fraud and treachery have been supposed by later writers. It was, however, taken and plundered: the venerable monarch was slain: the queen and her daughters, together with only one son remaining of a very numerous male progeny, were led into captivity. According to some, the city was totally destroyed, and the survivors of the people so dispersed that their very name was from that time lost. But the tradition supported by better authority, and in no small degree by that of Homer himself, whose words upon the occasion seem indeed scarcely doubtful, is, that Æneas and his posterity reigned over the Trojan country and people for some generations; the seat of government however being removed from Troy to Scepsis: and Xenophon has marked his respect for this tradition, ascribing the final ruin of the Trojan state and name to that following inundation of Greeks called the Æolic emigration.

Agamemnon’s Sad Home-coming