To be sure, in the Archaeology Thuc

To be sure, in the Archaeology Thucydides does not consistently use the same standard to assess the importance of a war. The arguments employed to belittle the Trojan war are different, if no less rhetorical. Here (1.10.3-5) Thucydides uses Homer against Homer, so to speak, in order to show that, as a whole, not many people had taken part in the expedition against Troy: if you take the fifty men per ship of Philoctetes' contingent and the one hundred and twenty Boeotians per ship, then make an average and multiply for the total number of the ships, you are supposed to see that the total of the warriors was fairly low, for an expeditionary corps coming from all of Greece. On this point Gomme, after calculating the sum which Thucydides does not give, and which actually turns out to be quite high, observes: "Thucydides cannot in fact be acquitted of a certain inconsequence; this excursus, like most of the others, has not been fully thought out." I have to confess that the Archaeology does not seem to me to be less than completely thought out. In this case I strongly suspect that Thucydides simply expected his audience to be impressed by his argument, and not to reckon precisely how many people would have taken part in the expedition according to his own calculation. Otherwise I can hardly figure an army of more than one hundred thousand men being defined as "not very numerous." We should not forget that Thucydides' text would most probably be heard rather than read, and the audience would not be in the condition to stop, do the sum and check the accuracy of Thucydides' statement. But be this as it may, and leaving aside the fact that Thucydides does not touch on the problem of how many people were fighting against the Greeks at Troy, if he had evaluated the Persian wars according to the same standard, using for instance Herodotus' figures for the strength of the armies involved, it would have been much more difficult to belittle them.