Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
chapter:
chapter 1chapter 2chapter 3chapter 4chapter 5chapter 6chapter 7chapter 8chapter 9chapter 10chapter 11chapter 12chapter 13chapter 14chapter 15chapter 16chapter 17chapter 18chapter 19chapter 20chapter 21chapter 22chapter 23chapter 24chapter 25chapter 26chapter 27chapter 28chapter 29chapter 30chapter 31chapter 32chapter 33chapter 34chapter 35chapter 36chapter 37chapter 38chapter 39chapter 40chapter 41chapter 42chapter 43chapter 44chapter 45chapter 46chapter 47chapter 48chapter 49chapter 50chapter 51chapter 52chapter 53chapter 54chapter 55chapter 56chapter 57chapter 58chapter 59chapter 60chapter 61chapter 62chapter 63chapter 64chapter 65chapter 66chapter 67chapter 68chapter 69chapter 70chapter 71chapter 72chapter 73chapter 74chapter 75chapter 76chapter 77chapter 78chapter 79chapter 80chapter 81chapter 82chapter 83chapter 84chapter 85chapter 86chapter 87chapter 88chapter 89chapter 90chapter 91chapter 92chapter 93chapter 94chapter 95chapter 96chapter 97chapter 98chapter 99chapter 100chapter 101chapter 102chapter 103chapter 104chapter 105chapter 106chapter 107chapter 108chapter 109chapter 110chapter 111chapter 112chapter 113chapter 114chapter 115chapter 116chapter 117chapter 118chapter 119chapter 120chapter 121chapter 122chapter 123chapter 124chapter 125chapter 126chapter 127chapter 128chapter 129chapter 130chapter 131chapter 132chapter 133chapter 134chapter 135chapter 136chapter 137chapter 138chapter 139chapter 140chapter 141chapter 142chapter 143chapter 144chapter 145chapter 146
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
10.
Now Mycenae may have been a small place, and many of the towns of that age
may appear comparatively insignificant, but no exact observer would
therefore feel justified in rejecting the estimate given by the poets and by
tradition of the magnitude of the armament.
[2]
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.
[3]
We have therefore no right to be skeptical, 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.
[4]
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.
[5]
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.
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. London, J. M. Dent; New York, E. P. Dutton. 1910.
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.
show
Browse Bar
hide
Places (automatically extracted)
View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.
Sort places
alphabetically,
as they appear on the page,
by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Greece (Greece) (2)Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Peloponnesus (Greece) (1)
Mycenae (Greece) (1)
Lacedaemon (Greece) (1)
Athens (Greece) (1)
Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.
hide
References (73 total)
- Commentary references to this page
(21):
- Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus, 15
- Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Antigone, 100
- Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Antigone, 67
- Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Electra, 563
- W. W. How, J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus, 7.20
- E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 2, 2.10
- E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 2, 2.15
- E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 2, 2.49
- E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 2, 2.6
- E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 6, 6.34
- T. G. Tucker, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 8, 8.1
- T. G. Tucker, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 8, 8.96
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 4, CHAPTER CII
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 4, CHAPTER XVIII
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 4, CHAPTER LXXV
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 4, CHAPTER LXXVI
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 5, 5.31
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 5, 5.49
- Walter Leaf, Commentary on the Iliad (1900), 2.760
- E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides Book 1, 1.2
- E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides Book 1, 1.74
- Cross-references to this page
(15):
- Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges, THE ARTICLE—ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
- Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges, THE CASES
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 1.3.1
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 1.4.2
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 1.pos=2.1
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 3.1.3
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 3.2.3
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 3.6.1
- A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), NAVIS
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), SPARTA
- William Watson Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb, Chapter II
- William Watson Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb, Chapter IV
- William Watson Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb, Chapter VI
- Sir Richard C. Jebb, Selections from the Attic Orators, 33.7
- Sir Richard C. Jebb, Selections from the Attic Orators, §§ 47 — 50.
- Cross-references in notes to this page
(1):
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Thuc. 2.41
- Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page
(36):
- LSJ, Μυ^κήνη
- LSJ, δηλ-όω
- LSJ, ἀξιόχρεως
- LSJ, ἀκρι_β-ής
- LSJ, ἀπιστ-έω
- LSJ, αὐτ-ερέτης
- LSJ, διπλ-άσιος
- LSJ, ἔδα^φος
- LSJ, ἐκεῖνος
- LSJ, ἐνδε-ής
- LSJ, ἐπί
- LSJ, εἰκάζω
- LSJ, εἰμί
- LSJ, κατά-φρακτος
- LSJ, κατασκευ-ή
- LSJ, κατέχω
- LSJ, λῃστ-ικός
- LSJ, λόγος
- LSJ, μέσος
- LSJ, μιμνήσκω
- LSJ, μοῖρα
- LSJ, ὄψις
- LSJ, οὕτως
- LSJ, οὔκουν
- LSJ, περαι-όω
- LSJ, περίνεως
- LSJ, πόλ-ισμα
- LSJ, ποί-ησις
- LSJ, πρός
- LSJ, πρόσκωπος
- LSJ, προέρχομαι
- LSJ, σα^νιδ-όω
- LSJ, συνεκ-δρομικῶς
- LSJ, συνοικ-ίζω
- LSJ, τέλος
- LSJ, ὑποτελ-ής
hide
Search
hideStable Identifiers
hide
Display Preferences