Greek and Roman Oared Warships 399-30BC

John Morrison

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785704321
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

This is an important study of the new types of warships which evolved in the navies of the Mediterranean in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, and of their use by Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans in the fleets and naval battles in the second and first centuries, culminating in the Battle of Aktion. The book includes a catalogue and discussion of the iconography of the ships with over fifty illustrations from coins, sculptures and other objects. John Coates discusses reconstructions, crews, ships and tactics illuminated by the recent experiments with the reconstructed trireme Olympias. Complete with gazetteer, glossary, bibliography and indexes.

1

THE AGE OF INNOVATION

IN THE 4TH CENTURY BC four new types of oared warships were developed, the four, the five, the six and the one-and-a-half-er (ήμιoλία); and Alexander is said to have invented sevens and tens. Later, types of still higher denomination were built in the Hellenistic centuries, no ship higher than a ten being used in battle. A reasonable conclusion from these higher denominations has been that the numerical element in the type names did not refer to the levels of oars. In the case of the three which had three levels of oars such reference was possible, but since more than three levels of oars is a physical impossibility the numerical element must have referred, as it did in the case of the galleys of Renaissance Italy, to the number of fore-and-aft files of oarsmen on each side of the ship, increased by manning the oars with more than one oarsman.

In the ήμιoλία (73) there was, on each side, one complete fore-and-aft file of oarsmen; and also, taking advantage of the ship’s greater breadth amidships, an additional half file on each side of the medial gangway. The ήμιoλία accordingly either had the half of its oars that were amidships double-manned or the oarsmen in each of the two files amidships rowed single-manned oars in pairs alia sensile. In either case there were one and a half files of oarsmen a side and the ship was properly named ήμιoλία. The first three new types exemplify the same innovation and the ήμιoλία may do so, i.e. the use of oars manned by two oarsmen at one, two and three levels; the seven involves triple- and double-manning at three levels and the nine quintuple manning at one level and quadruple manning at the other of two levels of oars.

1. DIONYSIUS I’S NAVAL PROGRAMME

Under the year 406 BC Diodoros relates (13.91.3–96.4) the rise of Dionysius to autocratic power in Syracuse in the face of the Carthaginian threat to the Greek cities of Sicily which he is depicted as turning to his own advantage. In 404 (14.7.3) he speaks of Dionysios, when he had made peace with the Carthaginians, turning to strengthen his rule in Syracuse by building on the island a fortified acropolis and including within its wall the naval installations of the small harbour of Lakkion, which were able to accommodate sixty threes and had a restricted opening through which only one three was able to pass at a time. Later (14.18) Diodoros describes his determination, now that his position was firmly established, eventually to make war on Carthage, and of his preparations involving the fortification of Epipolai which overlooked the city. By 399 (14.41.2) Dionysios judged that the occasion for war was favourable; and started to acquire the necessary armaments for a struggle which ‘would be great and lengthy since he was proposing to engage the most powerful people in Europe’.

(4.41.3) ‘Accordingly he began at once to assemble by decree craftsmen from the cities under his control, and attracted them with high wages from Italy and even from territory controlled by Carthage. He planned to manufacture a great quantity of arms and missiles of all kinds; and, in addition to them, threes and fives (να

ς τε τριήρεις και πεντήρεις), although a ship with the latter oar system had at that time not yet been built.’ Aristotle (Frg. 600: Preface xii) says that the four was invented in Carthage and Dionysios would certainly have known about it from the shipwrights from Carthaginian territory if her invention had occurred before this date. But either the four had not been yet been invented or he decided to build the more powerful five in preference.

Diodoros goes on to describe the public enthusiasm for the work at Syracuse and Dionysios’s part in it (14.42.1–3): ‘In fact the catapult was invented at this moment in Syracuse, when the best craftsmen had been brought together from everywhere to one place. The high wages, of course, and the number of bonuses offered for those who were adjudged the best, stimulated their enthusiasm. Quite apart from that, Dionysios every day going about among the work force spoke friendly words to them, rewarding the keenest with presents and inviting them to take food with him. As a result the craftsmen brought a spirit of competition to their work that was unsurpassable, and invented many new missiles and original devices of great potential usefulness. Dionysios began also to build threes and ships of the five kind (ναυπηγεία θ αι <να

ς> τ ε τριήρεις και πεντηρικά σκάφη), being the first to devise this latter type of warship. The fact was that Dionysios was aware that a three had been built first in Corinth and was keen to increase the size of warships built in the city which had been colonised from Corinth.’

Thukydides’ statement (1.13.2) that ‘threes were built first in Greece at Corinth’ has been taken to imply that they had previously been built elsewhere. His words certainly imply that threes were built elsewhere, but not that their building was previous to Corinth’s. That may be the case; but it is clear from Diodoros’s text, which derives from a fourth century source, that this latter implication was not drawn then and that Corinth was recognised as the inventor of at any rate a type of three. She also devised towards the end of the Peloponnesian war, as Thukydides also describes (7.34.5), the tactical and structural answer to Athenian battle tactics (AT p. 167) which played an important part in the defeat of the Athenian fleet in the Great Harbour of Syracuse in 414 BC. Dionysios could justly claim a place for Syracuse in the Corinthian tradition of naval innovation.

Dionysios also arranged for the importation of timber, ελάτη: Oar-tree’ and πεύκη (AT Ch. 10), and when he had collected a sufficient supply of wood (D. 14.42.5): ‘he began to build simultaneously more than 200 ships, and refit the 110 ships he already had. He was constructing also expensive shipsheds around the so-called Great Harbour, 160 in number, the majority accommodating two ships, and he repaired the existing sheds, which numbered 150’.

The euphoric tone of this account, its favourable attitude to Dionysios in general and in particular its repetitious emphasis on his invention of the five, is in strong contrast to the previous story of Dionysios’ rise to power. The Dionysios portrayed is no ruthless unapproachable tyrant, but a friendly, dynamic leader, a man of the people. The source is accordingly not Timaios, but may well be Dionysios’s faithful supporter and naval commander, Philistos, directly or indirectly. The passages quoted may be excerpts, incorporated by Diodoros in his Bibliotheca from Philistos’s biography of Dionysios I.

It has seemed illogical (and caused in the last century unnecessary emendations in the text of Diodoros and Aelian) that the five should have been invented before the four.¹ There is no illogicality. The four with two levels of double-manned oars was a very natural development of the two-level single-manned pentecontor or λέμβoς. The five, with three levels of oars, two of them double-manned, and five fore-and-aft files of oarsmen on each side of the ship, was a similarly strengthened three. The number of oarsmen in a five at the battle of Eknomos in 256 BC is given as 300 with 120 έπιβάται, here probably decksoldiers and ύπηρεσία, a total complement of 420. This may be an exaggerated figure since, the Roman fleet at Eknomos being an invasion force, it is likely that the number of decksoldiers was greater than if it had been a fleet prepared solely for battle.

A Calenian dish (18 I: second half of the first century BC), shows heavy warships, probably Carthaginian, with oars at three levels. The oars emerge en échelon from a boxed-in παρεξειρεσία. It will be argued below that the ships represented are fives.

The naval forces deployed by Dionysios I in the years of his long reign following his early naval programme do not suggest that the plans so optimistically described in Diodoros were carried out at all rapidly or completely. One five at least seems to have been built. In 398 Dionysios sent the prototype to bring back from Lokroi to Syracuse the daughter of a distinguished Locrian to whom he had proposed a diplomatic marriage. Eight years later, in 390, Dionysios, in a five, which was his flagship in a fleet of 50 warships attacking Rhegion, is described as escaping shipwreck in a storm in which seven of his ships, probably threes, were lost. The greater power of a five would have been useful on a lee shore.

Nor are the numbers of his ships impressive in the earlier years. In 397 at the siege of Motya Diodoros says that he had ‘a little less than 200 warships’ (D.14.47.7). (The newly invented catapult is reported to have been used effectively there from the land against warships (D. 14.50.4)). After the fall of Motya Dionysios sent his ναύαρχoς Lep-tines with 120 ships to lie in wait for the expected Carthaginian invasion fleet (D. 14.53.5), which, when it set out the following spring, deployed (D. 14.54.5) four hundred warships. Dionysios at this time is said to have had ‘a hundred and eighty ships of which a few were threes’ (D. 14.58.2). The text of this statement is suspect, and perhaps should read ‘of which a few were’ (fives and the rest) ‘threes’; but it certainly does not suggest a fleet commensurate with Dionysios’s reported plans; and in the fleets sent to sea by him in the next thirty years the numbers are no larger: a hundred in 393 (14.90.4), a hundred and twenty in 390 (D. 14.100.2), forty in 389 (14.103.2), sixty threes in 384 (D.15.14.3), nine threes sent to help the Spartans in 374/3 (D.15.47.7). Suddenly at the very end of his reign Diodoros presents a different picture of Dionysios’s military and naval power. He describes him in 368/7 (15.73.2) as ‘getting ready an invasion force of 30,000 footsoldiers, 3,000 cavalry and three hundred threes with an appropriate supply fleet’, and attacking the Carthaginian territory in Sicily. In the following winter Dionysios died. His son inherited his large fleet but not his interest in naval matters.

Aelian (Var.Hist. 6.12) speaks of Dionysios II having ‘his rule well fortified by the possession of not less than 400 ships, sixes and fives’. It is of course impossible that the fleet of 400 ships Dionysios inherited from his father contained only sixes and fives. Dionysios is described as using a five as a flagship or as a suitable ship for him to use on a diplomatic mission; but it is most unlikely that he had more than a very few. It is not impossible that he also had a few sixes, which like the fives his son inherited. Xenagoras (Pref. xii) says that the six was invented in Syracuse, and Dionysios who invented the five might well have proceeded at the end of his reign to invent the έξήρης or six. Diodoros (21.16) credits Agathokles of Syracuse in 289 with sixes in the fleet which at his death he was assembling for the invasion of Libya.

Lucan describes Brutus’s flagship at the battle of Massalia (p. 129) as standing higher than the other ships which included threes, fours and fives. She was however the only ship to be described as carrying towers. The six could have been a development of the four by triple manning oars at two levels but it seems more likely that Dionysios took the simpler step of double manning all the oars of a three-level ship.

We need not expel έξήρεις from Aelian’s text, emending it, as Scheffer (1642) and Delts (Teubner 1974), to τετρήρεις. Nevertheless the reading έξήρεις καì πεντήρεις is nonsense as it stands, stating that the fleet consisted of nothing but fives and sixes. We must either accept it, supposing that Aelian, knowing that Dionysios had both sixes and fives in his fleet naively thought that he had nothing else; or find a lacuna, e.g. after πεντήρεις and fill it with such words as (καì τριήρεις) ‘and threes’, or before έξήρης, and fill it with the words (

ένίαι

σαν) ‘some of which were’ as in the parallel passage, Diodoros 2.5.6. The text confirms, however, Pliny’s attribution of the invention of the six to Syracuse.

2. ALEXANDER THE GREAT (Map H, p. 74)

In the early spring of 334 (Arrian 1.11.3) Alexander set out from Macedonia for the Hellespont, leaving Antipatros in charge of Greek and Macedonian affairs. Plutarch (Moralia 327 d) writes that Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander’s generals and a historian, gave the size of his army as 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. He reached Sestos in twenty days and put Parmenion in charge of ferrying most of the infantry and the cavalry across the narrow strait to Abydos with 160 threes and a large number of round ships (στρoγγύλoι). The threes would have towed the round ships (p. 30). Both Arrian (1.11.6 ‘according to the general story’) and Diodoros (17.17.1) say that Alexander himself went on south to Elaios with 60 ships and made the longer (14.5 km) crossing from there to Sigeion, ‘the harbour of the Achaeans’, first to honour Protesilaos’s tomb at Elaios and then to honour the tombs of the heroes at Troy. He must have taken the rest of the footsoldiers with him (as the Summary of Curtius Book 2 in fact says), probably the Macedonian élite. Some of the 60 ships at any rate would have been in the category of ‘heavier στρατιώιδες’ (p. 21) of higher denomination than three. These ships were directly Macedonian (Hammond 1988 p. 25) as distinct from the 160 threes which when they were later taken south to Miletos by Nikanor are described as the Greek fleet, that is to say the fleet of the Hellenic League which its members were bound under treaty to provide (Curtius 3.1.20). At Miletos there is also reference in Arrian (1.19.4) to Macedonian threes as distinct from Nikanor’s threes. The 60 ships seem to have been Alexander’s personal squadron and ‘the rest of the infantry’ his bodyguard. There is reason to recognise specifically Macedonian ships again at the siege of Tyre (p. 6).

Shortly after the crossing Dareios was defeated at the Granikos river and Alexander moved southwards against first Ephesos which surrendered (A. 1.17.10) and then against Miletos, where the Rhodian Memnon, a Persian satrap, and other (mercenaries) survivors from the Granikos battle, organised resistance (D.17.22.1). The Persian fleet of about 400 (A. 1.18.5), later described as made up of Cypriot and Phoenician ships with well-trained crews, was in the offing. Nikanor with his Greek fleet of 160 threes arrived at Miletos three days before the Persians and took up moorings on the island of Lade, to which Alexander was able to ferry on his ships the Thracians and about 4000 mercenaries in addition, from his land forces. It must be assumed that Alexander’s squadron of 60 was already in the harbour of Miletos, in support of his land troops already besieging the city.

At this point (A. 1.18.6) Arrian gives a debate between Alexander and Par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• List of Maps
• List of Plans
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 THE AGE OF INNOVATION: 399–280 BC Appendix
• 2 SEA POWER IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: 280–200 BC
• 3 CHALLENGES TO ROMAN SEA POWER: 200–50 BC
• 4 FLEETS OF THE ROMAN CIVIL WARS: 50–30 BC Appendices A and B
• 5 ICONOGRAPHY
• 6 CATEGORIES AND TYPES
• 7 RECONSTRUCTIONS J. F. Coates Appendices A–F
• 8 CREWS, SHIPS, AND TACTICS
• Gazetteer
• Glossary
• Bibliography