As to naval personnel specifically, the thranitai among the crews sailing to Sicily received extra pay Thuc, VI, 31, The speaker in Lysias 21, 10 very strongly implies that he paid his helmsman considerably more money than the rest of his crew.
For what it is worth, the Ravenna scholion on Aristoph. The marines, too, who often belonged to the class of zeugitai, may have earned more money than ordinary rowers. It is possible, therefore, that the drachmas per ship per day that Egesta gave Thuc, VI, 8, 1 may not have been distributed equally among all crew members.
If there were in fact differentials in pay, and if the officers, marines, and archers were paid more than the rowing crew, the latter either got less money or they were fewer in number, and we do not know which was the case. The difficulty of distribution besets every passage about naval pay in the sources of the fifth and fourth centuries8. In short, insufficient information makes extrapolating the number of oarsmen from the rate of pay or from the amount of money allotted to a ship somewhat unreliable.
The method of deducing the number of oarsmen from the numbers of oars listed in the fourth-century naval inscriptions is also not entirely free of difficulties. Morrison and Coates write that "the total number of orsmen is nowhere given, but the naval inventories give the number of oars The inference that oars indicate oarsmen is possible, and perhaps plausible, but logically not compelling.
Tarn for one held that "during the few years they cover the naval lists perhaps show that no trireme had more than oars; they do not show that no trireme had less or that all were in use at once". It is sometimes assumed that these variations are simple errors of the stone mason11, but this seems questionable because there are also variations in the number of oars in some of the earlier lists.
As these numbers are not likely to be errors too, they cast some doubt on the proposition that a trireme's oarsmen always numbered In the absence of enough information about the effect of the reforms on the naval establishment as a whole, it seems best to regard with caution the numbers in the relevant naval lists and the deductions made from them.
A far greater difficulty is how to fill the gap between the oarsmen of the naval lists and the full complement of a trireme of men postulated by the accepted theory. Recent writers fill the gap with a hypothetical group of 30 men consisting of officers, marines and archers, whom they call hyperesia Torr, on the other hand, arrived at by adding the regular and the 30 reserve oars, implying 30 reserve oarsmen, that are mentioned in the naval lists One could argue that Torr' s combination has the epigraphical evidence, and so the greater authority, on its side, but as the presence on board of 30 reserve rowers to match the 30 reserve oars cannot be proved, this combination too is hypothetical.
Since the two hypotheses exclude each other, neither is very credible. The "Themistocles Decree" further complicates matters.
Depending on one's point of view, the decree may reproduce the state of naval organization and the manning of ships at almost any time from BC to the end of the fourth century. Such a large number can only refer to oarsmen, as Meiggs and Lewis say, and it contradicts the numbers in the naval inscriptions and in the literary texts.
In short, the evidence is either uncertain, incomplete, or contradictory. The oarsmen of a fifth-century trireme may sometimes have numbered , but this is hardly as certain as has been thought, and the likelihood is that very often their number was smaller.
Relying in part on a separate body of evidence and employing a different set of arguments, H. Wallinga shows that not all oarsmen rowed at the same time, and arrives at exactly the same conclusion as this paper, namely that a trireme's oarsmen generally numbered far fewer than men Arrangement of Rowers. The oarsmen called thalamioi took their name from the hold thalamos in which they sat. In the literary sources of the fifth century, the word thalamie, meaning porthole, occurs in Herodotus' story of Scylax who was stretched out in his ship with his head sticking out through the oarport V, 33, 2.
A part of his punishment probably was to have his head washed over by the surf now and then When the Athenians attacked Sphacteria, according to Thucydides IV, 32, 2 , they armed and put ashore on the island the crews of 70 ships, except for the thalamioi.
According to the current view of three-level triremes with a rowing crew of men, the oarsmen thranitai and zygitai landed on the island numbered 8, The Athenians also landed hoplites including the Messenians , 1, auxiliaries, and an unknown but sizable number ?
This means that ca. The comparison suggests that the armed oarsmen on Sphacteria were far fewer than 8,, so that on this occasion each crew consisted of less than oarsmen. The other two tell us something about the arrangement of the rowers.
Despite some comic exaggeration in them, we may regard Aristophanes'. The commentator Paley rightly points out that the backside of the rower breaking wind was close to the head of the thalamax This can only mean that the thalamax was seated on a level below the other man and behind him.
The passage is incontrovertible proof for the presence of two levels in the ship, and it rules out the theory, strongly argued by Tarn, that all rowers were on one level The other passage, from the Peace , shows Trygaeus sitting on an upturned or upright cuirass, which he is using as a commode He then slips his arms through both thalamiai, i. Trygaeus is imitating a rower who is sitting in the middle of the thwart and is rowing with both hands.
The humor of this scatological joke lies in the absurdity of using both hands in an operation requiring the use of one hand only. The joke is pointless unless the thalamax rowed with two oars, for a rower can hold two oars and row with both hands at the same time, but no one wipes himself with both hands at the same time. The passage thus suggests one arrangement familiar to Aristophanes' audience: the thalamakes or thalamioi sat in the middle of the thwarts on the lower level, and formed a single line of men along the central longitudinal of the hull.
They rowed with both hands, working an oar in either hand through the portholes to port and starboard. It is hard to see what other arrangement of oarsmen can be meant, if the passages of Aristophanes are to make any sense.
The passage from the Frogs makes it plain that there was another level of rowers, the thranitai, who sat at some slight distance above, and slightly ahead of the thalamioi. In the Acharnians Aristophanes calls the "people of the thranite oar" the "saviors of the state", a respectful reference to the forefathers, victorious at Salamis, of many in his audience, and a flattering compliment to their descendants.
The passage very strongly suggests that the thranitai were Athenian citizens. Thucydides VI, 31,3 speaks of the thranitai among the nautai, who received extra wages before the departure of the Sicilian expedition. As neither Aristophanes nor Thucydides is aware of yet another group of rowers in these contexts, it is logical to assume that the thranitai were the rowers who in the Frogs sat at some small distance above the thalamioi, and to whom they misbehaved.
This is exactly what Eustathius , 10 says: thalamitai and thalamakes are the rowers below the thranitai. If we interpret, as some do, the number three present in the word tri-eres as describing the.
An episode that Thucydides tells also implies that the triremes in his History were two- level ships. Since the historian elsewhere uses the adverbial expression kata meros of two groups alternating with each other IV, 26, 3 , the most natural interpretation of the passage is two groups of men taking their turn at rowing the trireme.
This is also the best interpretation of a passage in Xenophon Hell. The fifth-century writers know only two sets of oarsmen who rowed two-level ships.
Of the third set of rowers, the zygitai or zygioi there is no trace in the literary sources or in the Lenormant relief The scholion on Aristophanes, Frogs, , which mentions zygites, contains so much wrong information that it cannot be taken seriously as evidence for the presence of zygioi or zygitai on board the triremes.
It begins by saying that there were four groups of oarsmen in a ship, and then asserts that there were three such groups, all arranged on one level, an assertion flatly contradicted by the very passage of Aristophanes on which the scholiast was commenting.
The scholiast also says that the thalamians rowed with oars so short i. They may have earned less than their shipmates, but not for the reason given; oars that short are not attested in the naval lists, and there is reason to think, as we will see, that, if anything, the thalamian oars were longer, not shorter. The scholion on Aristophanes, Acharnians, , is just as worthless. Its manuscript does not have zygites, which is a modern conjecture, but zeugites25, which was the term for a member of the third Solonian census class, and had nothing to do with the arrangement of oars or oarsmen in a ship.
While the scholiasts were speculating, the lexicographers of the Roman Imperial and Byzantine periods in calling the oarsmen zygioi were very likely attributing some configuration of their own time to the ships of Athens It is,. The zygian oars in the lists suggest an alternate rowing arrangement, in which a second rower was added on the lower level as a companion to the thalamian oarsman.
Such an arrangement of four oarsmen in cross-section has been proposed by Tilley28 on the basis of his studies of the iconographie evidence see below. Tilley sees in the arrangement a development of the triple-banked trireme which took place when the ships were widened after the Persian wars.
It is not impossible that, when in this formation, the oarsmen, too, were called zygioi, on the analogy of thalamioi, but as the application of zygioi to men is unattested, this remains speculative. The two different rowing arrangements of Tilley' s imply oars of somewhat different lengths. The thalamian oars, worked by one man sitting in the middle of the thwart, had to be longer than the thranite and zygian oars; the latter were shorter, since they were worked by two oarsmen sitting closer to the ship's sides.
Being shorter and of equal length, the thranite and zygian oars evidently resembled each other sufficiently to be confused occasionally. Thus, in the naval list IG II2, , line 56, the inspector dokimastes declares that of an unknown number of thranite oars ten are zygian The two possible arrangements, i.
Torr thought this a difficulty in three- level ships and wanted to have 58 oars the mean between 54 and 62 for the middle level This difficulty vanishes for ships of two levels. Monokrotos, Dikrotos, Trikrotos. In Thucydides VIII, 95, 2 an axynkrotetos pleroma is a crew not trained to pull together; the verb synkroteo in its various forms refers to the training of groups, chiefly of oarsmen, to work together 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?
Advanced search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Sign In Article Navigation. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. There had to be over people just to row the oars of the Trireme.
The trireme was faster than other ships and only had one sail. By the end of the 4th century bce, armed deck soldiers had become so important in naval warfare that the trireme was superseded by heavier, decked-over ships with multiple rows of oarsmen. In BC Athens commissioned 1, triremes at a cost of 15, talents or 90 million drachmae. They were in all respects larger than contemporary war galleys up to 46 m and had a deeper draft, with more room for cargo — t.
With a full complement of rowers ranging from to men, all available to defend the ship from attack, they were also very safe modes of travel. A trireme was an Ancient Greek warship. They were the fastest, deadliest ships in the ancient world. Soldiers stood on deck, while oarsmen sat below. At its peak, Athens had a force of about triremes. The Ancient Greeks took their entertainment very seriously and used drama as a way of investigating the world they lived in, and what it meant to be human.
The three genres of drama were comedy, satyr plays, and most important of all, tragedy. Table of Contents. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. Do not sell my personal information. Cookie Settings Accept. Manage consent.
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