This text is part of:
11.
And the cause hereof was not so much want of men as of wealth.
For, for want of victual they carried the lesser army, and no greater than they hoped might both follow the war and also maintain itself.
When upon their arrival they had gotten the upper hand in fight (which is manifest, for else they could not have fortified their camp), it appears that from that time forward they employed not there their whole power, but that for want of victual they betook themselves, part of them to the tillage of Chersonesus and part to fetch in booties;
whereby divided, the Trojans the more easily made that ten years resistance, as being ever a match for so many as remained at the siege.
[2]
Whereas, if they had gone furnished with store of provision and with all their forces, eased of booty-haling and tillage, since they were masters of the field, they had also easily taken the city.
But they strove not with their whole power but only with such a portion of their army as at the several occasions chanced to be present;
when as, if they had pressed the siege, they had won the place both in less time and with less labour.
But through want of money not only they were weak matters, all that preceded this enterprise, but also this, which is of greater name than any before it, appeareth to be in fact beneath the fame and report which, by means of the poets, now goeth of it.
The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Thucydides. Thomas Hobbes. translator. London. Bohn. 1843.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.