Thucydides, a man who knew something of campaigning, is astonished at the length of the siege; and perhaps his patriotism was put a little to the blush at the idea that the assembled forces of Greece should be occupied ten years before a town of very inconsiderable magnitude; for no town of Ilium, we may remark in passing, ever existed that could present a worthy object of attack to so great a power, or was at all commensurate with the vast enterprise said to have been directed against it. He concluded, therefore, without hesitation, "that the Greeks were less numerous than the poets have represented, and that being, moreover, very poor, they were unable to procure adequate and constant provisions: hence they were compelled to disperse their army, and to employ a part of it in cultivating the Chersonese, and a part in marauding expeditions over the neighbourhood. Could the whole army have been employed against Troy at once, the siege would have been much more speedily and easily concluded." As Mr Grote justly observes, the critical historian might, with equal authority, have proceeded by a shorter method, and at once abridged the length of the siege. "Though literally believed," he continues, speaking of the Trojan war, "though reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past, by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a legend, and nothing more. If we are asked if it be not a legend embodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of truth,--whether there may not really have occurred at the foot of the hill of Ilium a war purely human and political, without gods, without heroes, without Helen, without Amazons, without Ethiopians under the beautiful son of Eos, without the wooden horse, without the characteristic and expressive features of the old epical war--like the mutilated trunk of Deiphobus in the under-world--if we are asked whether there was not really some such historical Trojan war as this, our answer must be, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself, without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records, indeed, the Homeric epic, in its exquisite and unsuspecting simplicity, would probably never have come into existence. Whoever, therefore, ventures to dissect Homer, Arctinus, and Lesches, and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving or verifying his conclusions."[4]