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Triremes at rest: On the beach or in the water?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2012

Cynthia M. Harrison
Cynthia M. Harrison
Affiliation:
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
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Extract

We have been fortunate enough to witness in our own time the launching of a reconstruction of an ancient trireme. Questions about the trireme's architecture that had been debated for centuries were definitively resolved by the research that preceded the building of the reconstruction. However, certain aspects of the care and handling of triremes remain to be examined. Among them is the notion that triremes in commission were customarily hauled up onto the beach at night.

Type
Shorter Contributions
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 119 , November 1999 , pp. 168 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1999

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References

1 Morrison, J.S. and Coates, J.F., The Athenian Trireme (Cambridge 1986) 1–24.Google Scholar

2 Tarn, W.W., ‘The Greek warship’, JHS 25 (1905) 213, 223CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hellenistic Military and Naval Developments (Cambridge 1930) 124Google Scholar; ‘The oarage of Greek warships’, Mariner's Mirror 19 (1933) 62.Google Scholar

3 Morrison, J.S., ‘The Greek trireme’, Mariner's Mirror 27 (1941) 27–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Morrison, J.S. and Williams, R.T., Greek Oared Ships 900-322 BC (Cambridge 1968) 169–70Google Scholar.

4 Thanks in part to the support of Gomme, A.W., ‘A forgotten factor of Greek naval strategy’, JHS 53 (1933) 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar (republished in Gomme, Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford 1937) 195Google Scholar). The ‘racing eight’ comparison continues to this day; see Cartledge, P. (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1998) 178.Google Scholar

5 Gomme, A.W., A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 1 (Oxford 1956) 19Google Scholar; Casson, L., The Ancient Mariners (New York 1959) 102.Google Scholar

6 Coates, J.F., Letter to the Editor, IJNA 26.1 (1997) 83.Google Scholar

7 Some discussions in Morrison and Williams (n.3) are rather confusing owing to the authors' multiple uses of ‘beach’, see esp. p. 311, where they claim that ‘hormein and kathormisasthai in Thucydides, if unqualified, mean beaching’.

8 Morrison and Coates (n.1) 153, 231; Morrison, J.S. with Coates, J.F., Greek and Roman Oared Warships (Oxford 1996) 329Google Scholar, under ‘Watertightness’, 355-6, under ‘Ship maintenance’.

9 Casson, L., Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Princeton 1971) 89–90.Google Scholar

10 How, W.W. and Wells, J., A Commentary on Herodotus, vol. 2 (Oxford 1928) 150.Google Scholar

11 This was the way the reconstructed trireme Olympias was brought to shore on its trial runs, see Whitehead, I., Coates, J., and Roberts, O., Chapter 3, ‘The sea trials’, in Morrison, J.S. and Coates, J.F. (eds.), An Athenian Trireme Reconstructed: the British sea trials of Olympias, 1987 (BAR International Series 486, Oxford 1989) 58–60.Google Scholar

12 Morrison with Coates (n.8) 177-254 has a full collection of illustrations; for ladders near the stern, see p. 184 fig. vii and p. 188 fig. x (with dolphin).

11 E.g., C.L. Brownson's Loeb translation; Morrison and Williams (n.3) 231 say that most of the ships were ‘on the beach or half-manned’.

14 Hammond, N.G.L., ‘The battle of Salamis’, JHS 76 (1956) 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar