"Thucydidies - The History Of The Peloponnesian War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thucydidies)

would therefore feel justified in rejecting the estimate given by
the poets and by tradition of the magnitude of the armament. For I
suppose if Lacedaemon were to become desolate, and the temples and
the foundations of the public buildings were left, that as time went
on there would be a strong disposition with posterity to refuse to
accept her fame as a true exponent of her power. And yet 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