Yet there is scarcely any portion of the Iliad where both historical and internal evidence are more clearly in favour of a connection from the remotest period, with the remainder of the work.

The composition of the Catalogue, whensoever it may have taken place, necessarily presumes its author's acquaintance with a previously existing Iliad.

It were impossible otherwise to account for the harmony observable in the recurrence of so vast a number of proper names, most of them historically unimportant, and not a few altogether fictitious: or of so many geographical and genealogical details as are condensed in these few hundred lines, and incidentally scattered over the thousands which follow: equally inexplicable were the pointed allusions occurring in this episode to events narrated in the previous and subsequent text, several of which could hardly be of traditional notoriety, but through the medium of the Iliad."-- Mure, "Language and Literature of Greece," vol.i.p.

263.
102 -- _Twice Sixty:_ "Thucydides observes that the Boeotian vessels, which carried one hundred and twenty men each, were probably meant to be the largest in the fleet, and those of Philoctetes, carrying fifty each, the smallest.

The average would be eighty-five, and Thucydides supposes the troops to have rowed and navigated themselves; and that very few, besides the chiefs, went as mere passengers or landsmen.