upon Atreus-the Mycenæans through fear of the Heracleida desiring it, holding, too, a high estimation of his ability, and won by his cultivation of the favor of the masses acquired the throne of Eurystheus, and made the line of Pelops greater than that of the Perseida. 3. To this throne and this power Aga memnon succeeded, and thus, I think, and by the acquisition of a larger naval force than elsewhere existed, was enabled, more by the terror he inspired than by the favor which he attracted, to compel the enterprise against Troy. 4. I say by the acquisition of a superior naval force; for he appears to have come attended by more ships than any other, and furnishing vessels too for the soldiers of Arcadia, as indeed Homer establishes, if we may rely on such testimony, who, in the passage wherein he traces the transmission of his sceptre, declares him "to be king over many isles and all Argos." Of many isles he could not have been king,-dwelling on the Continent, — nor of any but those few immediately adjacent to it, unless he had possessed supremacy at sea. 5. From the extent and character of this expedition to Troy, we may form a conjecture of those which preceded it.

X. That Mycena was small-as indeed what city of that far remote period seems for its magnitude worthy of noticeaffords no satisfactory proof that this armament was not as considerable as the poets have sung, and as the received opinion deems. 2. For if the city of the Lacedæmonians were wasted and deserted to-day, and its temples and the foundations of its great structures only were left, there would be cherished in the course of time, I think, with those of after ages, a general disbelief that its power ever justified its renown. Yet do the Lacedæmonians possess two of the five divisions of the Peloponnesus, and command it all, and many allies beyond it; but their city not being compactly built, nor containing in it any considerable variety of temples and other great structures, distributed rather into separate villages, in the old fashion of Greece,

1 Arrived at the age of Agamemnon, let us sum up and complete the sketch of the historical facts and dates of the times before. The Hellenes issuing from Phthiotis in Thessaly, gave their name successively to each city, at last to all Greece. This is after Homer. Still, before the Trojan war, no united enterprise is undertaken. For that even they were fitted at last only by becoming naval powers. Minos first created a navy, expelled the Carians from the Cyclades, colonized them, and swept the old piracy from

the sea. The age and customs of piracy sketched. Its suppression paved the way for permanent settlements. The accumulation of wealth and the advancement of civilization, fitting at last for the expedition to Troy. The Asiatic origin of Pelops, the bestowment of his name on the Peninsula, — the accession of Atreus to his throne and that of Eurystheus, prefacing a grand and strong succession for the son and grandson Agamemnon, and blending the lines of Perseus and of Pelops.

- it would appear inferior to the reality. If, on the other hand, a similar calamity should befall Athens, we might infer from her ruins that she had been double her actual dimensions. 3. Hasty incredulity, therefore, we are not to indulge, nor to advert rather to the looks than the actual power of cities; and we may rationally hold that the army of the siege of Troy was larger than any which preceded it from Greece, yet inferior to those of this time, relying so far upon Homer, who, while as a poet he would amplify and aggrandize it, yet leaves it smaller than those of the present day. 4. Homer makes the expedition to consist of twelve hundred ships. Those of the Boeotians he makes to contain one hundred and twenty men, those of Philoctetes fifty, -expressing, I think, only the largest and the smallest numbers; for in his catalogue of the ships he mentions the numbers in no other vessels. That all on board were at once rowers and soldiers, is probable. With regard to the ships of Philoctetes, he expressly declares all who rowed to have been archers also; and that there should have been many supernumeraries on board, except the kings and chiefs, is unlikely, as the ships were full of warlike equipments and without decks, like the pirate vessels of an earlier day. 5. Making an average, then, of the numbers in each of the twelve hundred ships, the whole armament, when you consider that all Greece united to send it forth, will not appear to have been very considerable.

XI. The cause of this I do not find so much in the fewness of the inhabitants of Greece, as in their want of the ways and means of war. For want of provisions they led forth a smaller force than otherwise they might and would, and such an one only as they thought might by force subsist itself. Arrived at the seat of war, they defeated the enemy in battle. This is proved by their having been able to fortify their camp with a wall, which else they could not have done. It is quite plain, too, that they did not subsequently bring their whole force into action, but for want of provisions they were obliged to be diverted towards the cultivation of the Chersonesus and to piracy, whereby the Trojans were enabled to hold out by force for ten years, being at all times equal to that part of the scattered forces of the Greeks which remained to prosecute the war. 2. But had they carried with them an adequate supply of the means of the service, and could they with united forces, undiverted by agriculture or piracy, have pressed the siege uninterruptedly, they could easily have taken it by battle; since a detachment of them alone were able always to oppose the Trojans. Sitting down regularly to besiege it, in less time, with less effort, they could have effected the object in view. 3. Through want of means of war it was that all military expeditions before this

were inconsiderable; and this, more renowned than any of them, appears to have been inferior to the fame with which poetry has invested it.

XII. And after the Trojan war, too, Greece still presented the same form of life, migrating from place to place, unsettled, so that it might not yet rest and grow. 2. The return of the Greeks, so long deferred, produced many changes, and revolutions or seditions followed in many cities, I may say everywhere, which expelled portions of the inhabitants, who then set forth and planted colonies elsewhere. 3. For example, the nation now called Boeotians, in the sixtieth year after the taking of Troy, being expelled from Arne by the Thessalians, settled as a colony in the State now called Bootia, before that called Cadmeïs, although there had been a detachment from them in that State before, of whom were those of that name who shared in the Trojan war. And in the eightieth year after the taking of Troy, the Dorians, with the Heracleida, took possession of and held Peloponnesus. 4. So that through a long series of difficulties it was, and after a long time, that Greece became settled and at rest. When it did so, it began to send forth colonies, and the Athenians planted Ionia and many of the islands, and the Peloponnesians planted the greater part of Sicily and of Southern Italy, and some portions of other parts of Greece. All this era of colonization was subsequent to the Trojan war.

XIII. And now Greece having grown more powerful and more rich, there were in almost all her cities tyrannies estab lished, individual accumulation of wealth having greatly increased. The earlier form of government had been monarchic, hereditary, and with defined prerogatives. Now also the Greeks began to build navies, and to attach themselves more closely to the sea. 2. And the Corinthians are related to have first attained to a naval architecture very closely resembling that which now obtains, and to have constructed triremes first at Corinth. 3. It is quite certain that Ameinocles, a Corinthian ship-builder, constructed four vessels for the Samians, about three hundred years before the close of the war whose history I have undertaken, and that the earliest naval battle of which we know, was one between the Corinthians and Corcyræans, two hundred and sixty years prior to the close of that war. 5. This early naval superiority of Corinth in war was attributable to its situation on the Isthmus, by means of which felicity of position it became a mart of trade for all the Greeks; since from the earliest times the tribes, both within and without the Peloponnesus, holding intercourse more by land than sea, mingled with each other through the Corinthian territory. Hence, the city

became rich, as is indicated by the old poets, who call the place "the wealthy." And after general Greece had turned itself somewhat more to naval life, Corinth by its own more considerable fleets, of which I made mention before, contributed prominently to clear the sea of piracy, and thus making itself an enlarged mart, both for the trade of the water and the land, grew still more powerful by a still larger accession of wealth. 6. Next to Corinth the Ionians acquired a considerable navy in the time of Cyrus the first king of the Persians, and of Cambyses, his son; and during the war with Cyrus, in which they were involved, they for some time asserted the mastery of the sea which washes their coast. Polycrates, who was king of Samos during the reign of Cambyses, having a predominant naval force, subjected other islands, and having taken Rhenea, annexed it to the Delos of Apollo. The Phocæans, too, who engaged in founding Massilia, vanquished the Carthaginians in a battle on sea.

XIV. These were the more important of the ancient naval forces and states. And these navies, it is quite certain, for many generations after the Trojan war, contained very few triremes, but were composed mainly of long sharp ships, single banked and of fifty oars, according to the model of the time of the Trojan war. 2. And it was only just before the Persian war and the death of Darius, who succeeded Cambyses on the throne of Persia, that the tyrants of Sicily, and the Corcyræans, possessed any considerable number of triremes; and these last were the only navies worth mentioning which existed in Greece before the expedition of Xerxes. 3. For the Æginetans and the Athenians, and any others possessing any fleets, had inconsiderable fleets, chiefly of the class of singlebanked fifty-oars. And it is now quite recently that Themistocles persuaded the Athenians, then engaged in war with the Æginetans, and expecting daily an incursion of the barbarians, to construct the ships in which they fought, and these were not completely decked.

XV. And these were the earlier and the later navies of Greece. Yet those chiefly rose to power who possessed them, acquiring by that means revenues and dominion over others. For they reduced and annexed the islands. Such especially did so whose territory had before been insufficient. 2. On land there was no war whence dominion could be won. All such hostilities were directed only against the adjoining neighbor. Armies of foreign invasion Greece sent not forth. 3. For her States did not project and execute expeditions of invasion, by entering into leagues either of subordination to some large State or of equality among themselves, but confined themselves to

strifes with their neighbors. The only considerable exception was the case of the war of the Chalcidians and Eretrians, in which the rest of Greece, on one side or the other, generally participated.

XVI. The growth of all parts of Greece was slow. Some obstacle hindered one, some another. To the Ionians it befell, that when their affairs had advanced to a very prosperous condition, Cyrus, the prince of Persia, having conquered Cræsus, and all within the Halys, advanced to the sea, and reduced the cities of the main land to slavery; and that Darius subsequently, by aid of a Phoenician fleet, subjected the adjacent islands.

XVII. And with regard to the tyrants of the Greek cities, having an eye only to their own private interests, looking only to their own personal security and pleasure, and the aggrandizement of their own families, their policy was to govern as quietly and as securely as possible; and nothing worthy of notice was achieved by them, unless it were against their several neighbors. The Sicilian tyrants, it is true, advanced to a large measure of power. 2. And thus, by these various influences, it came to pass that universal Greece was for a long period crippled and held down, so that it neither achieved any splendid united enterprise, and no one city dared attempt anything.

XVIII. And after the tyrant of Athens and of those other parts of Greece, which, quite universally and even before it happened to Athens, had become subjected to tyrants, had been deposed, except those of Sicily, by the Lacedæmonians, (for Lacedæmon, although, from the time of its settlement by the Dorians, it was torn by factions for a longer season than any other State whose history we know, yet from a very ancient time has been under the administration of good laws, and has never been governed by tyrants; for it is more than four hundred years, reaching backward from the end of the Peloponnesian war, that it has maintained the same polity, and has thus become powerful itself, and able to assist in settling the affairs of other States), after this expulsion, I say, of the tyrants by Lacedæmon, it was but a few years before the battle of Marathon was fought by the Medes and Athenians. 2. Ten years after that battle the barbarian again invaded Greece with a large army, for the purpose of reducing it to slavery. In that great crisis the Lacedæmonians took the lead of the united Grecian States, being the first in power, and the Athenians upon the approach of the Medes, having determined to leave their city, broke up their homes, and embarking in ships, became an armed fleet. Having by a common effort repulsed the barbarians, it soon happened that all, both those who had revolted from the king, and those who, independent before, had associ