For Diomed and Idomeneus have each eighty ships, and Nestor has ninety, so that their numbers would come very near Agamemnon’s, unless their ships were smaller. But to sum up this discussion. It is evident that, if only we suppose the Greeks of Homer’s time to have had a definite and well developed sense of number, the mention by Homer of the amount of force in the Trojan expedition would have been a fact of the highest national interest and importance. Yet he has left us nothing, which can be said even definitely to approximate to a record of it, though the enumeration of the Catalogue appears almost to force the subject upon him. The fair inferences seem to be, that he did not understand the calculative use of numbers at all, or beyond some very limited range; and that, even within that range, he for the most part employed them poetically and ornamentally; they were decorative and effective, like epithets to his song, but they were not statistical; as expressions of force they were no more than (as it were) tentative, and that but very rudely. I am further confirmed in the belief of Homer’s indeterminate conception of number, from the strange result to which the contrary opinion would lead. He tells us of the Trojan bivouac[815]; [815] Il. viii. 562. χίλι’ ἄρ’ ἐν πεδίῳ πυρὰ καίετο· πὰρ δὲ ἑκάστῳ εἵατο πεντήκοντα. In this case he has given us again the factors of a sum in multiplication, though not the product. Did he mean them to be taken literally? If he did, then it is indeed strange that, although he says nothing whatever on the subject of number in the Trojan Catalogue, yet he has here supplied us with all the particulars necessary for estimating the Trojan force, while as to the Greek army, we remain unable to say whether it amounted to fifty thousand, or to half, or to twice or thrice that number. But it is quite plain from the total absence of specified numbers in the Trojan Catalogue, that he had no desire, as indeed he had no occasion, to give an accurate account of the Trojan force. On the other hand it appears, from the details of the Greek Catalogue, that he did wish to describe the amount of the force on that side, as far as he could conceive or convey it. If all this be so, then nothing can show more clearly than the thousand Trojan watch-fires, with their fifty men at each, Homer’s figurative manner of employing numerical aggregations. If however we admit the figurative use, we at once find everything harmonious. He describes the Trojans by the method of bold enhancement, at a juncture of the poem where it is his purpose to make them terrible to the Greek imagination.