11.
The cause of the inferiority was not so much the want of men as the want of money;
the invading army was limited, by the difficulty1 of obtaining supplies, to such a number as might be expected to live on the
country in which they were to fight. After their arrival at Troy, when they had won a
battle
(as they clearly did, for otherwise they could not have fortified their camp),
even then they appear not to have used the whole of their force, but to have been
driven by want of provisions to the cultivation of the Chersonese and to pillage.
And in consequence of this dispersion of their forces, the Trojans were enabled to hold
out against them during the whole ten years, being always a match for those who remained
on the spot.
[2]
Whereas if the besieging army had brought abundant supplies, and, instead of betaking
themselves to agriculture or pillage, had carried on the war persistently with all their
forces, they would easily have been masters of the field and have taken the city; since,
even divided as they were, and with only a part of their army available at any one time,
they held their ground.
Or, again, they might have regularly invested Troy, and the place would have been
captured in less time and with less trouble.
Poverty was the real reason why the achievements of former ages were insignificant, and
why the Trojan War, the most celebrated of them all, when brought to the test of facts,
falls short of its fame and of the prevailing traditions to which the poets have given
authority.
1 Considerations respecting the Trojan War.
Thucydides translated into English; with introduction, marginal analysis, notes, and indices. Volume 1. Thucydides. Benjamin Jowett. translator. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1881.
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