History of the Peloponnesian War | Page 4

thus expelled the malefactors.
The coast population now began to apply themselves more closely to

the acquisition of wealth, and their life became more settled; some even
began to build themselves walls on the strength of their newly acquired
riches. For the love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion
of the stronger, and the possession of capital enabled the more powerful
to reduce the smaller towns to subjection. And it was at a somewhat
later stage of this development that they went on the expedition against
Troy.
What enabled Agamemnon to raise the armament was more, in my
opinion, his superiority in strength, than the oaths of Tyndareus, which
bound the suitors to follow him. Indeed, the account given by those
Peloponnesians who have been the recipients of the most credible
tradition is this. First of all Pelops, arriving among a needy population
from Asia with vast wealth, acquired such power that, stranger though
he was, the country was called after him; and this power fortune saw fit
materially to increase in the hands of his descendants. Eurystheus had
been killed in Attica by the Heraclids. Atreus was his mother's brother;
and to the hands of his relation, who had left his father on account of
the death of Chrysippus, Eurystheus, when he set out on his expedition,
had committed Mycenae and the government. As time went on and
Eurystheus did not return, Atreus complied with the wishes of the
Mycenaeans, who were influenced by fear of the Heraclids--besides,
his power seemed considerable, and he had not neglected to court the
favour of the populace--and assumed the sceptre of Mycenae and the
rest of the dominions of Eurystheus. And so the power of the
descendants of Pelops came to be greater than that of the descendants
of Perseus. To all this Agamemnon succeeded. He had also a navy far
stronger than his contemporaries, so that, in my opinion, fear was quite
as strong an element as love in the formation of the confederate
expedition. The strength of his navy is shown by the fact that his own
was the largest contingent, and that of the Arcadians was furnished by
him; this at least is what Homer says, if his testimony is deemed
sufficient. Besides, in his account of the transmission of the sceptre, he
calls him
Of many an isle, and of all Argos king.

Now Agamemnon's was a continental power; and he could not have
been master of any except the adjacent islands (and these would not be
many), but through the possession of a fleet.
And from this expedition we may infer the character of earlier
enterprises. 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.
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