204 Remarks on the Site of Troy 
the time consumed in storming the Grecian 
lines, which must have been considerable, 
the armies are represented to have traversed 
the plain, from the camp to the city, no less 
than four times, and that too between the 
hours of noon and sunset. ‘This distance ac- 
cording to Rennellis nearly twenty-eight miles, 
and that the armies should actually have tra- 
versed so great a space in so short a time is 
certainly in the highest degree improbable, 
if not absolutely impossible. But there is 
an easy, and perhaps satisfactory, method of 
explaining this, or any other difficulty of a 
similar nature, Homer we know to be most 
exact in his topography, and describing as 
accurately as he was intimately acquainted 
with his scenes, no one has been able to con- 
vict him of an error. But the actions of his 
poem rest on a different foundation: he did 
not witness them; he must therefore have 
followed some circumstantial account handed 
down by verse, or tradition ; or else his know- 
ledge of the events must have been merely 
general, amounting, perhaps, to nothing 
more than a bare outline. 
In the former case, to have crowded the 
events of two days into one is a slight 
error to have crept into an account in the 
course of three hundred years; and in the 
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