Homer’s highest numeral is μύριοι. He describes the Myrmidons as being μύριοι[794], though, if we assume a mean strength of about eighty-five for their crews, the force would but little have exceeded four thousand: and at the maximum of one hundred and twenty for each ship, it would only come to six thousand. Again, Homer uses the expression μύρια ᾔδη, to denote a person of instructed and accomplished mind[795].
Next to the μύρια, the highest numerals employed in the poems are those contained in the passage where the Poet says that the howl of Mars, on being wounded by Diomed, was as loud as the shout of an army of nine thousand or ten thousand men[796]:
ὅσσον τ’ ἐννεάχιλοι ἐπίαχον ἢ δεκάχιλοι
ἀνέρες ἐν πολέμῳ.
But it is clear that the expressions are purely poetical and figurative. For he never comes near the use of such high numbers elsewhere; and yet it obviously lay in his path to use these, and higher numbers still, when he was describing the strength of the Greek and Trojan armies.
The highest Homeric number, after those which have been named, is found in the three thousand horses of Erichthonius. This we must also consider poetical, because it is so far beyond the ordinary range of the poems, and in some degree likewise because of the obvious unlikelihood of his having possessed that particular number of mares[797].
Only thrice, besides the instances already quoted, does Homer use the fourth power of numbers; it is in the case of the single thousand. A thousand measures of wine were sent by Euneos as a present to Agamemnon and Menelaus. A thousand watch-fires were kindled by the Trojans on the plain. Iphidamas, having given an hundred oxen in order to obtain his wife, then promised a thousand goats and sheep out of his countless herds[798]. In all these three cases, it is more than doubtful whether the word thousand is not roughly and loosely used as a round number. The combination of the thousand sheep and goats with the hundred oxen, immediately awakens the recollection that even the Homeric hecatomb, though meaning etymologically an hundred oxen, practically meant nothing of the kind, but only what we should call a lot or batch of oxen. Again, it is so obviously improbable that the Trojans should in an hurried bivouac have lighted just a thousand fires, and placed just fifty men by each, that we may take this passage as plainly figurative, and as conveying no more than a very rude approximation, of such a kind as would be inadmissible where the practice of calculation is familiar. It is then most likely, that in the remaining one of the three passages, the Poet means only to convey that a large and liberal present of wine was sent by Euneus, as the consideration for his being allowed to trade with the army. There is certainly more of approximation to a definite use of the single thousand, than of the three, the nine, or the ten: but this difference in definiteness is in reality a main point in the evidence. Most of all does this become palpable, when we consider how strange is in itself the omission to state the numbers of the combatants on either side of this great struggle: an omission so strange, of what would be to ourselves a fact of such elementary and primary interest, that we can hardly account for it otherwise than by the admission, that to the Greeks of the Homeric age the totals of the armies, even if the Poet himself could have reckoned them, would have been unintelligible.
Among all the numbers found in Homer, the highest which he appears to use with a clearly determinate meaning, is that of the three hundred and sixty fat hogs under the care of Eumæus in Ithaca[799];
οἱ δὲ τριηκόσιοί τε καὶ ἑξήκοντα πέλοντο.