Polyaenus III, 11, 7 uses the verb of the training of oarsmen; the trainees, who are Egyptians, sit on long boards arranged parallel to each other on the beach, and forming several single files of oarsmen. They practice rowing in unison to the commands of an unspecified number of bilingual keleustai.
This last detail, and the correct Thucydidean use of the technical verb synkroteo suggest that Polyaenus' information in this story is reliable. From this scheme it follows that, when applied to a vessel, the compound verbal adjective monokrotos had reference to oarsmen trained to row in a single file; this is the meaning of the word in a passage in Strabo VII, 7, 6.
A dikrotos therefore should be a vessel manned by oarsmen trained to row in pairs, i. This arrangement too is attested in the literature Thus monokrotos and dikrotos have nothing to do with levels; the words do not refer to the vertical but to the horizontal or athwartships disposition of crew members trained to row together, as in the passage of Polyaenus. They cannot refer to the training of rowers sitting on different levels on only one side of a ship, because rowing, as every sculler knows, can be practiced only if both sides of a boat are manned.
Trikrotos is absent from the classical texts and occurs only in Aelius Aristides Or. Xenophon's report Hell. The passage neither says nor implies anything about tiers or levels.
The Evidence of the Representations. The negative conclusion drawn from the literary sources, that from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC there was no third level, can be tested against the positive evidence of the ancient representations of ships. In the controversy between the sailors and the scholars over the number of levels in a trireme, Tarn sided with the practical sailors who have always regarded three-level ships as an impossibility The work done in recent years by a practical sailor, Commander A.
Tilley of the Royal Navy,. Relying on years of experience at sea as a professional naval officer, and using his technical knowledge and sharp eye, Tilley has made a thorough examination of the iconographie evidence and has reinforced his arguments and conclusions with practical experiments In the course of these investigations, the results of which he has published in a series of acute and discerning articles, Tilley has succeeded in establishing not only the number of levels in fifth-century triremes, but also in explaining certain specific maneuvers illustrated in the representations and recognized by no one before him Tilley' s conclusions may be summed up as follows.
On the lower level a single line of oarsmen rowed with two oars, one oar in either hand. The upper level held two lines of oarsmen each of whom worked one oar. In an alternate and somewhat later arrangement noted above a second rower was added to the bench on the lower level The evidence of the pictorial representations is thus in perfect agreement with the evidence of the literary sources.
The two sets of evidence, entirely independent of each other, invariably show ships of only two levels, and only two groups of oarsmen, the thranitai and the thalamioi. As Tilley says, the triple-banked, two-level ship provides the explanation for the conclusion of Morrison and Williams, that there is a "total lack of literary evidence for the two-level oared ship [of the representations];" this is so, because "the two-level, triple-banked ships [of the representations] are triremes" In point of fact the lack of literary evidence is not so total.
The passages discussed above never mention more than two levels: the triremes in the literature, too, are two-level ships. The passage in the Peace about Trygaeus and the commode in particular is a perfect match for Tilley' s two-level, triple-banked trireme.
Tilley is inclined to believe that this configuration belonged to the earlier triremes; but it appears that the audience was still familiar with the triple-banked arrangement in BC, when the Peace was first performed. Triremes of this type may therefore still have been in use in the later fifth century. Hyperesia in the Historians. In there appeared in the Scientific American an article explaining how oarsmen in a trireme achieved a more powerful stroke by sitting on a greased piece of leather which allowed them to slide back and forth on the thwart The term for this rowing cushion was hyperesion?
Despite the identity of the plural form apart from the pitch with the feminine noun hyperesia? In the long chapter VI, 31 Thucydides describes the strength and splendor of the armada departing for Sicily in BC, on which the Athenians have expended enormous amounts of public and private wealth and effort. After the final preparations for getting under way and the attendant religious ceremonies, the ships leave port and, before shaping course for Sicily, stage a regatta as far as the island of Aegina VI, 32, Much of the story is about the Athenians' willingness to spend money in the hope for financial rewards from the conquest of the island.
Using vivid and forceful language, Thucydides particularly stresses the rivalry among the captains striving to put to sea with the fastest ship. Spending his own money on equipment for his ship, "every single triefarch was extremely eager that his own ship should excel in good looks and speed":??
VI, 31,3. In their eagerness to have such ships, the trierarchs give bonuses, over and above the one drachma paid them by the state, to the thranitai among the nautai and to the hyperesiai. If those who define hyperesia as a group of 30 men and who also hold that the oarsmen always numbered are correct39, only the thirty privileged and perhaps regularly better paid men on deck, i. This means that the captains gave nothing to , or about two-thirds, of their oarsmen.
Yet these were the very oarsmen on whom the Athenian trierarchs, addicted to competition as all other Greeks, depended, first, to race and win in the regatta to Aegina, secondly to propel their ships on a long and difficult voyage, and thirdly, to face the dangers of the coming sea battles in Sicily.
No ancient or modern captain in his right mind would deliberately slight the greater part of his crew by showing such egregious favoritism to only one- third of his sailors. The consequences of such an act hardly need reciting: the ensuing bitterness, jealousy, and ill will would be such as to destroy the morale of the entire crew at the very beginning of a distant and dangerous campaign. One may reasonably doubt that even a single trierarch would deliberately turn his crew into sullen and unwilling oarsmen thinking of desertion, and one might still more reasonably wonder if one hundred Athenian trierarchs would be unintelligent enough to do so.
The argument against bonuses only to selected members of the crew is just as valid for a crew consisting of fewer oarsmen and regardless of their civic or social class. Thucydides is saying that at the outset of the Sicilian expedition the entire rowing crew, not just a part of it, received additional remuneration from the trierarchs. The captains, instead of promoting alienation, disloyalty, and malingering, very wisely gave their entire rowing crews an incentive to remain loyal and to work hard at their oars.
This is precisely what Dionysius I did: he too gave his slave oarsmen an incentive to do good, loyal work by manumitting the slaves first and then manning the ships with them Diod. Sic, XIV, 58, 1. Taken together, the context of chapter VI, 31,3, which requires the meaning of oarsmen for hyperesia, and the parallel measure of Dionysius amount to proof that hyperesia ai refers to rowing.
The hyperesiai are the "under-rowers" who sat below the thranitai in the thalamos for the explanation of the expression?? With this meaning. If in other fifth-century writings amph-eres? Hyperesia also has the meaning of oarsmen in the speech of Pericles of , who says:?? The crucial word here is alios which can mean either "the rest", or "in addition", "as well", "besides", so that the sentence may mean either "we have citizen helmsmen and the rest of the hyperesia are more and better than those of the rest of Greece", or "we have citizen helmsmen, and in addition we have hyperesia that are more numerous and better than the rest of Greece".
Those who have convinced themselves that the helmsmen and other deck officers constituted the hyperesia, believe that alios here means "the rest" This, however, is not so.
In his analysis of the naval situation facing the Athenians, Pericles enumerates the various constituents of a naval crew: the foreigners among the sailors, their replacements, the Athenians themselves, the metics, the helmsmen, and finally the hyperesia.
In such enumerations, as the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddel- Scott- Jones says, alios means "as well", "besides;" and the lexicon supports this meaning with a wealth of examples The meaning "the rest" has been defended with the argument that, since? A much more convincing argument can be made for the opposite proposition: since variation of all kinds is the principal stylistic device of Thucydides45, his Pericles avoids using the same words in the same sense so closely together.
Moreover, he avails himself of a kind of shorthand to include all on board: the terms kybernetes and. The kybernetes was the top professional career man on board a ship the trierarchs being "civilian" ad hoc appointees and was stationed on the afterdeck, above the rest of the crew.
The hyperesiai, of lowlier status than the thranitai and the marines, sat in the bottom of the ship. The linguistic and stylistic arguments can be supplemented by an argument from substance. Pericles sees a weakness in the fleet; it is the possibility that the mercenary crew members may desert for higher wages elsewhere.
This is a problem because the number of mercenaries is large; if it were small, it would not be a problem and Pericles need not bring the matter up at all. That large numbers of mercenary oarsmen are his overriding concern is shown by the section I, , 2, where he reassures his audience that the mercenaries will probably remain loyal rather than risk exile from their homelands.
But their desertion is conceivable, and Pericles states the problem and its remedy in hypothetical form: should the mercenaries desert it would be terrible if we did not have a sufficient quantity of our own men to replace them. This of course begs the question, do we in fact have enough men or not?
Since a two-part conditional such as this is not the best way to reassure an audience, Pericles puts the matter positively: the situation as it stands at the present time is this??? In this analysis the potential deserters and their Athenian replacements are equated with hyperesia; the focus of the passage is not on a comparatively small number of officers, but on a rather large number of quality oarsmen who may have to be replaced with equally large numbers p?
Athenian oarsmen. The helmsmen are brought in almost incidentally, to assure the assembly that they too are citizens. It is again the numbers of rowers which decide the meaning of hyperesia at the opening of Book 8. Thucydides reports that when the Athenians saw that they no longer had enough ships and hyperesiai for them, they lost all hope of being able to save themselves VIII, 1, 2.
A moment's reflection will account for their hopelessness. The first requirement of a warship, in fact of any ship, is to be able to move: without motive power it is completely useless. At this juncture the Athenians still had some warships, but the ships were immobile, and they were immobile because they lacked oarsmen.
The officers were not as crucial because, being comparatively few in number, they could, as a last resort, be replaced by the ablest and most experienced of whatever ordinary seamen were still available at Athens. This was actually the method by which the positions of deck officers were filled in normal circumstances see below.
But replacing the very large numbers of well-trained and experienced oarsmen perhaps as many as 20, men lost in Sicily would indeed have reduced the Athenians to hopelessness. In the fourth century the veteran oarsmen of Athens were in demand by the rulers of the Bosporan Kingdom and the Persians. The greatest part of the armed forces of the Kingdom consisted of mercenaries.
The army was largely made up of Scythians, who were landlubbers and made good soldiers and cavalrymen, but were poor sailors. Of the more than seventy sailors of non-Greek origin known to us from inscriptions, only one is a Scythian; he was a slave belonging to an Athenian, and may even have been born in Athens IG I3, , line Diodorus XX, 22, lists more than 20, Scythian foot soldiers, 10, Scythian cavalry, 2, Greek and 2, Thracian mercenaries in the employ of the Kingdom. Although some of the Kingdom's trierarchs were citizens, the bulk of its sailors, like that of its army, was mercenary, hired in large numbers from Athens, the place that had the best hyperesiai.
As the Kingdom was quite rich in the fourth century, it could afford to hire the best oarsmen The Oxyrhynchus Historian 7, 1 Bartoletti and Isocrates 4, say that Athens sent hypersiai to the ships in Persian service commanded by Conon in the s. The Historian , 1 also relates Conon's efforts in to find money for his mercenaries. They had not been paid for many months because of the Persian King's practice not to pay the men fighting for him, or more precisely, to send a little money to his commanders at the beginning of a war, and to pay nothing later.
As his commanders had no private money, their forces disintegrated. On the present occasion Conon tells the Persian chiliarch Tithraustes that this is about to happen to his fleet; the war may be lost for lack of money. Tithraustes sends two Persians with talents from the estate of Tissaphernes to pay Conon's stratiotai, a term that clearly includes the oarsmen. He then appoints two deputies who are to spend the rest of the money from the estate ca. Conon's Cypriot mercenaries hear a false rumor that only the hyperesiai and the marines will be paid with the money, whereupon they mutiny.
This context shows that the hyperesiai here must be oarsmen. On the theory that the hyperesiai are the officers, the historian, who reports the matter of the crews' wages at such length and in so much detail, including the detail of a false rumor, has not said one word about the reaction of the oarsmen when they heard that they too, like the Cypriote, were not going to be paid.
The oarsmen formed by far the largest component of Conon's force, probably numbering in the neighborhood of 15, men, yet those who argue that the hyperesiai are officers are in effect saying that these 15, men were content to continue unpaid. The reason for the oarsmen's inaction is that they are the hyperesiai: they are not angry and do not resort to mutiny like their Cypriot comrades-in-arms because they either have or are about to receive a least some of their back pay.
Compare this incident with what Polybius says about Agathocles: he appeased the anger of his soldiers to a considerable extent by giving them their pay XV, 25, The facts of the narrative compel the meaning "rowers" for hyperesia, and it is not. Yet another passage showing that hyperesia means rowers is from Polybius V, , In Philip finds that he needs ships and naval crews??
He considers that the Illyrians build the best ships, and orders vessels lemboi from their shipyards, being almost the first Macedonian king to do so. Having equipped his ships and collected his manpower, he trains the Macedonians in rowing for a short while and then goes to sea p?? He now has oarsmen hyperesiai , and so can put to sea.
In Polybius I, 25, , as in the previous passages, it is again the context that is helpful in determining the meaning of hyperesia. It is a story in which events happen suddenly and quickly.
Gaius Atilius Regulus sees a chance to attack the Carthaginian fleet as it sails past in disorder. He orders his fleet to follow him as he rushes off with ten ships to engage the enemy. The rest of his crews begin to board their ships and are still in the process of boarding or are barely getting under way, when the enemy ships encircle Regulus' ship and the other ten with him.
What emerges from the narrative is that the Roman fleet was not ready for sea and for battle. When Regulus gave the order, the crews were on shore and had to board their ships and get under way in great haste.
The ten ships in the van evidently sailed without full oaring crews, for they could not get up enough speed to escape the Carthaginian ring. But Regulus' ship, since it was the flagship and was lying at anchor out in the stream? About the two occurrences of hyperesia in Arrian I, 20, 1 and VII, 19, 4 Morrison concludes that the second "must include oarsmen", and "that it is probable that the case is the same in the earlier passage of Arrian". His view, however, is that this is a late use which has no bearing on the early meaning of the word He rightly points out that the naval lists mention various pieces of equipment "made of hair", parablemata, pararrymata, etc.
It follows from this that the hyperesiai for whom the protective screens are a necessity must be oarsmen, a meaning that confirms the conclusion drawn from every passage discussed above. Morrison, however, rejects the probative value of the statement on the grounds that it is very. Morrison in fact, along with some others52, urges a surprisingly wide and improbable range of meanings for hyperesia, among them naval arm or capability , defensive equipment, dispatch boats, marines and archers, deck officers, and finally oarsmen.
In explaining the semantic development of the word he starts from the more abstract and general meaning of service, assistance to the trierarch, and arrives at the specific and concrete meaning of oarsmen.
A case can be made for exactly the opposite development. The hard physical labor and the constant application required of rowers at sea gradually came to be a byword for difficult, unceasing service in general - the sort of service expected from slaves. The trend toward this general meaning evidently began in the fifth century; Aristophanes Wasps, juxtaposes the words slavery and service d??? According to Polybius XV, 25, 21 Agathocles filled up the vacant places of the royal "friends" by putting in them the most insolent and reckless from the body of servants and the rest of the hyperesia e?
Here the lowly status and low character of the replacements, as well as the pairing of the two nouns exactly in the manner of Aristophanes, indicate that hyperesia refers to menial service.
Pleket quotes a passage from the edict to Ephesus, issued in the reign of Claudius by P. Fabius Persicus, in which the governor of Asia forbids free persons to carry out the tasks of public slaves, d????? It is evident that this expression too, which occurs twice in the document, is very close to that quoted from the Wasps above. In other post-classical texts, too, hyperesia appears to refer to any hard and menial service; in the Geoponica hyperesias is probably modified by naval nautikas so as to leave no doubt that the oarsmen of a warship are meant.
In the patristic literature the word signifies the assiduous service of the lowly human being to God, or the body of people, the ministers, performing such service. This meaning of lowly service has endured into Modern Greek, where hyperesia may mean domestic servant As in other languages the terminology for crew members varies in Greek.
When the actual work of rowing is uppermost in the writer's mind, his word for the crew is eretai rowers. Crew members could also be indicated according to their location and seats in the ship, as we saw above. The main problem that the sources put in the way of a proper understanding of the naval rank structure is that they use nautes in different senses.
The word was the generic term for sailor, and as such it. Thucydides and Herodotus, for instance, often use it in this general sense. In the same way a sailor or a soldier in English usage can be, informally, anyone from an admiral or general to an ordinary seaman or private soldier.
March 18, by Kids Discover. High-tech in its day, a triple-decker warship called the trireme was a key to sea power for the ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans. These boats were easy to maneuver and built for speed, with three rows of oars on each side and one man for every oar.
It took men, 85 per side, to make up the crew of one trireme. With all that manpower, triremes were faster than ships that ran only under sail. Before heading into battle, the crews would lighten the load by leaving unnecessary items on the shore including the sail so the ship could be even speedier.
It seems strange to reduce the number of warriors but the bireme and trireme were faster than the pentekonter and with their ram a bronze tipped projection from the bow front of the ship it was much easier to destroy a pentekonter even if it had much more warriors. An obtused-prowed bireme version was produced in Samos during the period of Polycrates.
The name of the first ship of this type was Samaina or Samaena that could be used as a trading or as a warship Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae and Plutarch Pericles. The Corinthians begin first of any men to build ships with three orders of oars, called Triremes.
Hitherto the Greeks had used long vessels of fifty oars. It was the Greek trireme or trieres in Greek , with three tiers of rowers, that proved to be the defining weapon of the battle of Salamis in BC. The invention of the trireme could be around BC by Ameinocles the Corinthian, who made the Samians acquainted with it Thucyd. The triremes could move fast under sail, reaching a maximum of perhaps 14 knots under the most favourable weather conditions some consider 10 knots more realistic.
The speed without sail was probably around 8 knots. The speed of the ship depends on the length, shape, weight, on the physical condition of the rowers and various physics phenomena friction, wave drag, etc. Experts say that even without knowledge of hydrodynamics the ancient Greeks optimized the trireme such that it was the fastest ship in antiquity.
It was Themistocles who proposed to build a fleet of triremes. He also carried a decree, that every year twenty new Triremes should be built paid by the silver of the mines of Laurium. After the time of Themistocles as many as twenty Triremes have been built every year as the vessels of a light structure did not last long.
The whole superintendence of the building of new Triremes was in the hands of the senate of the Five Hundred Demosth. According to Stephan Schulz " Suddenly, speed and maneuverability became prime concerns. Image of a Ram. The trireme was probably the most formidable ship ever designed for fighting with a ram. The Greeks used the ram to punch a hole in an enemy ship below the waterline and sink it. This tactic was known as diekplous. The trireme when dressed for battle was nothing else but a stripped- down water-borne projectile, propelled by human muscle power.
A tall mast and a smaller close to the front of the ship..
0コメント