When Menelaus returned home, he was naturally wroth at finding his hospitality so ill requited; and after having in vain endeavored, both by remonstrances and threats, to induce the Trojans to send him back his queen, he applied to the princes who had formerly been Helen’s lovers, and called upon them to aid him according to their oaths, in recovering her from her seducer. They obeyed the summons; and all Greece being indignant at the insult offered to Menelaus, a general muster of the forces of the various states took place at Aulis, a seaport town of Bœotia preparatory to their crossing the Ægean to the Trojan shore. This is supposed to have happened in the year 1194 B. C. Of the chiefs assembled on this occasion, the most celebrated were Agamemnon, king of Mycene; Menelaus, king of Sparta; Ulysses, king of Ithaca; Nestor, king of Pylos; Achilles, son of the king of Thessaly; Ajax, of Salamis; Diomedes, of Ætolia; and Idomeneus, of Crete. Agamemnon, the brother of the injured Menelaus, was elected commander-in-chief of the confederated Greeks. According to some ancient authors, this general was barbarous enough to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, to induce the gods to send a favoring gale to the Grecian fleet when it was detained by contrary winds in the port of Aulis; but as the earliest writers respecting the Trojan war make no mention of this unnatural act, it is to be hoped that it never was performed. The Grecian armament consisted of about 1200 vessels, with from 50 to 120 men in each, and the army which warred against Troy is supposed to have amounted altogether to about 100,000 men. The Trojans, although reinforced by auxiliary bands from Assyria, Thrace, and Asia Minor, were unable to withstand the Greeks in the open country, and they therefore soon retired within the walls of their city. In those early times men were unskilled in the art of reducing fortified places, and the Greeks knew of no speedier way of taking Troy than blockading it till the inhabitants should be compelled by famine to surrender. But here a new difficulty arose. No arrangements had been made for supplying the invaders with provisions during a lengthened seige; and after they had plundered and laid waste the surrounding country, they began to be in as great danger of starvation as the besieged. The supplies which arrived from Greece were scanty and irregular, and it became necessary to detach a part of the beleaguering forces to cultivate the plains of the Chersonesus of Thrace, in order to raise crops for the support of themselves and their brethren in arms.