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Reconstructing History: The Athenian Trireme
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
J.S. MorrisonJ.F. CoatesN.B. Rankov |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Evidence for the importance of seamanship in ancient Greece can be gleaned from among diverse sources: from Homer's Odyssey, from the vases produced in the fifth-century-BC heyday of Athenian power, and from the underwater archaeological remains of the ships themselves. But how did these ancient ships function, and what was life on board actually like? Three men--J.S. Morrison, J.F. Coates and N. B. Rankov--set out to discover just that by reconstructing a Greek trieres (better known in English as the trireme). Here they outline their justification for undertaking such a project. |
 ared warships, of which the trieres is the most famous, lie at the heart of the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman story as it unfolds from Homer to Constantine. In the seventh and sixth centuries BC, oared galleys took Greek colonists from their mother cities to all parts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In 480 BC a great Persian armada was defeated by a much smaller Greek fleet in the narrow waters between Attica and the island of Salamis. Athens' ensuing maritime supremacy was founded on the crucial role which she played in that famous victory. The skilled use of the trieres enabled her to win, and for some decades to keep, the hegemony over some, at least, of her former Greek allies. In the fourth century larger oared ships--"fours," "fives," and "sixes"--were built in Sicily at Syracuse to meet the growing seapower of Phoenician Carthage, and "fours" and "fives" were employed at the end of the century by Athens and in the Levant. |
 After the death of Alexander, his successors in the late fourth and third centuries BC disputed among themselves the command of the Eastern Mediterranean in fleets of increasingly large denomination. Rome had to build fleets of "fives" (quinqueremes) and accustom herself to their use in a war with Carthage for the control of Sicily. In 31 BC at the sea battle of Actium, fought in oared ships of a great variety of sizes, the young Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra and gained the mastery of the Roman world as the emperor Augustus. |
The importance of the navy
To understand the naval confrontations of ancient history, on which the future of western civilisation has so often turned, it is essential to know as much as possible of the nature and potentials of the vessels in which the two sides fought, as well as to form an idea of the economic and social aspects of the organisation of fleets; and knowledge of the trieres is basic to the understanding of the larger ships. The trieres was the first type of oared warship to be pulled by oars at three levels. No representation of an oared warship exists showing oars at more than three levels. It seems likely, then, that the types of denomination five to eight were pulled at three levels employing more than one man to an oar, in a five at two levels and in the others at all three levels. The four is likely to have employed two men at each of two levels and the types larger than eights to have employed gangs of men at big oars again at two levels. It follows that understanding of the trieres is important in relation not only to the deployment of that ship herself but also to the deployment of the larger ships which also were pulled by oarsmen at three levels. |
To Athens in the fifth and early fourth century BC the importance of the trieres hardly needs to be emphasised. The fleet of 200 triereis built shortly before the second Persian invasion, when she was involved in a naval war with Aegina, enabled the Greeks successfully to repel the invasion when it came. The entrance fee to the club of naval powers was high, and we are told that Athens was only able to afford it by using, at Themistocles' suggestion, the proceeds of a lucky strike in the silver mines at Laurium. These ships were also, Plutarch tells us (Cimon 12.2), specially designed by Themistocles "for speed and quick turning," information which suggests that he had his own ideas of trieres tactics. Only by understanding these tactics and the nature of the ships which employed them can we form an idea of how the Greeks were able to defeat a fleet three times the size of their own. |
After the repulse of the Persian invasion a naval force under Athenian command proceeded to liberate the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the off-shore islands, as well as part of Cyprus, and later invaded Egypt. In the last third of the fifth century Athens, now at war with her Peloponnesian allies, ensured her power at sea with a mastery of that special skill in fighting with triereis which was the despair of her rivals, and which, in the end, led her to overestimate the value of sea power against a continental league. In 415 an over-confident and ill-planned naval expedition to Sicily ended in disaster, and was a prelude to Athens' ultimate defeat by Sparta and her allies in 404, after some brave attempts to re-establish her naval command of the Aegean. Even after her defeat and surrender she managed with inadequate resources and varying success to cling to some semblance of maritime supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean for more than three-quarters of a century, in competition with strong Peloponnesian, Theban and ultimately Macedonian fleets, until her defeat at sea by a Macedonian-led Phoenician fleet off Amorgus in 322. A fitting epitaph for Athenian sea power is the proud reply put into the mouth of an Athenian traveller by a comic poet (Aristophanes, Birds 108) in the year of the Sicilian expedition. Asked for his country of origin he gives the answer: "Where the fine triereis come from." It was, it seems, the superior quality of her ships of which she boasted. This, very briefly, is the story of the Age of the Trieres, and of the trieres as the weapon by which Athens achieved and maintained, and in which in the end she lost, her power and prosperity. The trieres was not only a battle weapon but also the means by which Athens deployed her military power quickly and for the most part effectively. |
The need for reconstruction
The trieres is important, firstly because her design is basic to the designs of some of the subsequent ancient oared warships, and secondly because she played so significant a role in preserving the political and economic conditions in which Athens was able to make her great contribution to ideas of human society, to art, literature and philosophy. We need to know, and modern historians of Greece have not yet told us, how the trieres played that role, or rather how it was that the Athenians exploited more successfully than others the potential of the three-level oared ship as a naval weapon, and what that potential was. We want to know how she was used, to attempt to recognise the tactical purposes for which she was built, her strengths, and the limitations on her use which those strengths necessarily imposed. Fundamental questions need to be answered about the physical environment provided for her crew, the practice of pulling and sailing, her performance under oar and sail, the pay and recruitment of her crew, and the materials with which she was built. All this may be called the theoretical reconstruction of the trieres, and it needs to be set out as far as the evidence we have will allow. |
There are two possible kinds of indisputable evidence for an ancient object: actual recognisable remains and a detailed description in contemporary literature. Neither exists for the trieres. |
Recent activities of underwater archaeologists in the Mediterranean have produced no remains of a trieres to give a whole or partial answer to questions about the hull-structure or oarsystem, although numerous remains of ancient merchant ships have been found, some of them deriving from the fifth and fourth centuries BC and offering a useful analogy for building a trieres' hull. Nor do historians writing at the time when the trieres was the standard warship of contemporary fleets give the kind of detailed descriptions of her such as we have of the monster double-hulled "forty" which Ptolemy Philopator built or of the Byzantine dromon. |
The enquirer must satisfy his frustrated curiosity by picking up information about the trieres from any contemporary source he can. |
First will be the narratives of the historians describing the actions and voyages of triereis at sea. These will give him a feel of what sort of ship the trieres was. The picture he gets will be supplemented by passing references to triereis or things connected with them in the poets--tragic and, in particular, comic--and even in the philosophers. |
After literature, archaeology provides a variety of indirect information. The excavated remains of the Zea ship-sheds, built for triereis, give the maximum overall dimensions of the ship (c. 37 metres long, c. 5.9 metres broad) (see figure 1). The surviving inventories of the Piraeus naval dockyards, inscribed on stone and covering a number of years in the last third of the fourth century, provide a wealth of detailed information, in particular the length and number of the oars in the various categories. Finally there are the vase-paintings, reliefs and coins which can be claimed to represent the trieres, though no ship is labelled as such. |
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| Figure 1: The ship-sheds at Zea. | |
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The intricate process of piecing together the clues from all these sources has the fascinating quality of a detective story and has attracted professional interest not only among classical scholars. |
Practical observations
A trieres, Olympias, was reconstructed accordingly and tested at sea under oar and under sail. These trials have demonstrated beyond doubt that three-level oared ships are entirely viable. Olympias has shown that single-manned oars of the same length can be positioned at all three levels so as to reach the water and without the angle of the top level being too steep to be rowable. This confirmation of the practicability of the basic design is perhaps the most important outcome of the sea trials, since it removes one of the longest-standing objections to this explanation of how triereis were arranged. |
A great deal more has been learnt about what is required of such an oarsystem if it is to be capable of achieving the performances ascribed to triereis in the ancient literature. Oars need to be light, despite the risk of fragility, and highly geared, and to be held firmly in place against the thole. The stroke needs to be as long as possible, which makes it desirable to employ the long 0.49 metre cubit now attested for Attica in the reconstruction of the two-cubit interscalmium. This length of interscalmium would also allow the hull beams (zyga) to be positioned so that the thalamians could pass beneath them at each end of the stroke, thus avoiding one of the major restrictions on stroke-length in Olympias. For maximum length, however, and therefore for maximum agility, which is highly desirable for successful ramming, each rower would have to be canted so that his oarhandle would pass outboard of the man immediately astern. |
Performance under oar could, we believe, be brought up to the required level by means of the modifications proposed. Performance under sail is already impressive in Olympias, in particular her ability to sail close to the wind with minimal leeway. Handling under sail and manoeuvrability under oar have left little to be desired, even though the drag on the rudders has frequently made it desirable to operate the ship with one rudder up and the other only half-lowered. The hull has survived in waves of up to 0.75m in height and the askomata have proved entirely adequate to keep water out of the ship, despite the proximity of the thalamian oarports to the water. These aspects of performance would be unaffected by modifications to the oarsystem. |
Much has also been discovered about the management of the oarcrew. The rowers must be kept as comfortable as possible to endure long periods at the oar. The importance for comfort of cushions on the seats is now evident, as is the need for some sort of covering to protect rowers from the sun, be it a rigged awning or a wooden canopy as in Olympias. Even more important is good ventilation, to allow the rowers to work efficiently, and an adequate supply of water--about 1 litre per rower per hour. The latter should be regarded as an absolute requirement and has implications for the logistics of long voyages and fleet movements. Xenophon's observations on the importance of crew morale and the role of the keleustes in maintaining it (Oecon. 21.3) have also been borne out by practical experience on board Olympias. Similarly, both the improvement over time of Olympias crews and the remaining inadequacies of even the best of them accord well with the words which Thucydides (1.142.9) puts into the mouth of Pericles, that "sea power is a matter of skill ... and it is not possible to get practice in the odd moment when the chance occurs, but it is a full-time occupation, leaving no moment for other things." |
One lesson which was relearned the hard way is that, while a human engine like an oarcrew can row directly into a head wind, say to reach shelter or claw round a headland or keep clear of a lee shore, it cannot do so indefinitely without becoming exhausted. These many factors affecting the men who rowed the triereis will have been the foremost considerations in the minds of admirals, trierarchs, helmsmen and keleustai alike, whether they were embarking on a long voyage or going into battle, but they have largely been forgotten today. Herein lies one of the principal justifications for the building and testing of a reconstruction. |
Conclusion
It will be clear that the reconstruction, operation and analysis of Olympias have required a multiplicity of skills and talents. Since its inception nearly twenty years ago, the Athenian Trireme project has benefited from the input of historians and archaeologists, naval architects and shipbuilders, rowers, sailors and seamen, physicists and physiologists, and many others. Their co-operation has necessitated a considerable willingness on the part of individuals schooled in widely differing disciplines to understand each other's modes of thinking. By the same token, this multi-disciplinary approach has often made it difficult to convince specialists outside the project of the validity of some of the evidence and arguments. Historians have found it hard to understand just how narrowly definitive are the laws of physics upon the design of an extreme ship-type such as the trieres. Archaeologists have been reluctant to accept a design which is based on historical, archaeological and iconographical evidence but not on actual ship remains. Naval architects and physicists have found it difficult to deal with data which are subject to shifting historical interpretations. Modern sport rowers have viewed with scepticism a fixed-seat stroke with the oar rigged forward of the pin. |
This essay is intended to make the evidence and arguments and many different modes of thinking as accessible as possible. Through the process of collecting together the indications from antiquity, bringing to bear on them the craft of the naval architect which is bound by the laws of physics, and creating a reconstructed ship, Olympias, which has been tested at sea under oar and sail, we hope and believe that we have learned a great deal about the Athenian Trireme. We know that not all questions have been answered and that there is still much more to learn. But our fascination with the most famous warship of the ancient world remains. |
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