A large ancient warship that was powered by both sails and oars. The joys of The Sun crossword. A Greek word for a Galley, a vessel developed as a warship, with three rows of oars.
A trireme is a warship with a ram powered by sail and three banks of oars, carrying a crew and marines of They were called biremes. These ships were frequently used by the Romans, The bireme eventually evolved into the trireme. A Row Boat Dinghy, skiff, wherry, gig, jolly boat, dory, galley, trireme,.
Bireme or trireme. It was an oar and sail powered ship galley used in ancient times. The term "trireme" refers to having 3 rows of oars, which provided the maximum amount of power for that size of ship. While used extensively for travel on the Mediterranean, they were generally unsuited for ocean voyages.
The basic ancient warships could be called either a monoreme, a bireme, or a trireme. This was determined by the levels of oarsmaybe. The history of the ancient ships is clouded as there is very little written material about them and even less accurate depictions. Historians wrangle about whether the numerical prefex, bi, tri,quad, quinc refer to the levels of oars or to the number of rowers on each oar. A trireme was a roman boat. The combined fleets of the Peloponnesian League.
The principal warship of the time was the trireme, a narrow ship with three banks of oars and a ram in front. It was light and fas tand easy to manoeuver. Each trireme carried about rowers. A beak of metal was built at the front of the ship like a battering ram which could damage and sink the enemy's ship. Here is a sentence that uses the word trireme. The trireme project has been delayed and will need to be rescheduled. Around This was the typical boast used by the ancient Greeks on the Mediterannean.
It possessed a sail but was also oar powered with up to three banks of oars, which were especially used during skirmishes. Probably the trireme. It was a ship with three rows of oars and around crew members It could reach up to 14 knots but its average speed was 8 knots. Search Kids Discover. All Blog Posts. Quick View.
Print Title. Already a Member, Log In:. Register below:. 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.
But there are indications here and there in the sources that in the Athenian navy nautes was a term with special significance. First, it was an honorific title reserved for sailors who were Athenian citizens and metics, and also for citizens of states allied with Athens who served in her ships.
This fact is firmly attested by an inscription and by the orators of the fourth century Secondly, there are indications that the appellation nautai included the officers; there was a strong connection between officers and men, for the officers rose from the rank and file.
In Aristophanes' Knights a sailor works his way up the promotion ladder, beginning as a rower and gradually advancing to the rank of kybernetes. Pseudo-Xenophon Ath. As however the officers did not row, he is using elaunein in two senses, to row and to get a ship going and keep it going, i. The latter meaning is also present in two passages of Thucydides. Especially in getting a ship underway it is the small group of officers with their skill and judgment gained from experience who perform all the crucial tasks.
They give the orders to cast off from the mooring, to avoid obstructions and other navigational hazards, to increase or decrease speed, and to set the course and cruising speed once the ship has gained the open sea. The officers "drive" the ship as a motorist drives a car. This is precisely what Nicias tells the Athenian assembly: "the nautai who can get a ship underway and who can hold the rowing together are few"??????
The first task belongs, as every sailor knows, to the officer of the deck who has the con; the second to the boatswain who "holds the rowing together", i. In the navy of Athens these officers were the kybernetes and the keleustes assisted by the auletes. As the station of the kybernetes and the other navigating officers was on deck, Nicias in another passage Thuc, VII, 63, 2 directs his tactical advice and encouragement to the nautai and the hoplites "whose work is performed topside", i.
The sum of these various pieces of evidence is that a small group of the nautai maneuvered the ship, and gave orders to the rowers; they show that nautai is wholly appropriate as a title for officers with respect to number they are fewer than the rowers57 , political-social class they are citizens or metics , and duties performed. Since none of these qualifications is attested for hyperesia anywhere,58 it follows that the officers of an Athenian trireme were not called hyperesia.
With the meaning of "under rowers" for hyperesia, Thucydides' specification "the thranitai of the nautai" t??? This passage, too, agrees with the rest of the evidence, namely that the officers of a trireme were numbered among the nautai. The same bipartite division of a crew into nautai and hyperesia that we find in Thucydides is present in some fifth- and fourth-century speeches. In every one of these the meanings "sailor", "seaman" for nautes and "rowers" for hyperesia yields excellent sense.
In [Demosthenes] 50, for example, the trierarch Apollodorus constantly divides his naval crew as distinguished from the marines into nautai and hyperesia? Except for his own ship, the fleet with which Apollodorus sailed was manned by citizen conscripts 6, 7. Apollodorus dismissed the few nautai that reported to his ship because they were incompetent, and hired freelances in their stead 11, This turned out later to be the chief source of many of his troubles, which were not shared by his fellow trierarchs.
This was because their nautai were conscripts under military discipline, and so had to remain on board until the general demobilized them Apollodorus' problems with his nautai take up much of his discourse. Among them are Athenian citizens and residents of Athens, some with family households, and non- Athenians whom he recruited from various places abroad 7, 12, 13, 18, But what they all have in common is that they are professionals who command high wages and can readily find employment with the highest bidder for their services Accordingly they are in a position to demand their wages from Apollodorus 25 , and although he does his best to pay them, they frequently desert.
Apollodorus has his hands full paying, retaining and replacing them 1 In this he is assisted by one of his officers, the pentecontarch Euctemon, who helps the trierarch run the ship in several ways: as recruiting officer, supply officer, and paymaster 11, 19, Nowhere in the speech is there the slightest suggestion that Euctemon is a member of the hyperesia.
The narrative represents him as completely unconnected with the hyperesia; if anything he is connected with the nautai, whom he recruits. Again, it is one of the nautai, rather than a member of the hyperesia, who assists his captain, just as Euctemon does.
Callicles, the son of Epitrephes of the deme of Thria, advises Apollodorus not to take on board an exile sentenced to death at Athens.
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