John Morrison - Greek and Roman Oared Warships 399-30BC

First published in the United Kingdom in 1996. Reprinted in 2016 by

OXBOW BOOKS

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Oxbow Books and the individual authors, 2016

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-401-7

Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-90018-807-4

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-432-1 (ePub)

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-433-8 (kindle)

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-434-5 (pdf)

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Front cover illustration by Rebecca Forwood

CONTENTS

1THE AGE OF INNOVATION: 399280 BC
Appendix

4FLEETS OF THE ROMAN CIVIL WARS: 5030 BC
Appendices A and B

7RECONSTRUCTIONS J. F. Coates
Appendices AF

ABBREVIATIONS

LIST OF MAPS

LIST OF PLANS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

THIS BOOK IS A STUDY of the new types of warship evolved in the navies of the Mediterranean in the fourth and third centuries BC and of their later employment culminating in the battle of Aktion. Since the ships were in some cases invented, built and manned not only by Greeks and Romans but by Phoenicians, Egyptians, Italians and Carthaginians, the title Greek and Roman Oared Warships seems a bad fit.

Our defence is partly that a title must be short and partly that in the Hellenistic centuries there was a Greek and Macedonian, and a Phoenician and Roman design of oared warships.

The Greek historian Arrian, who was a citizen of both Rome and Athens and governor of the Roman province of Cappadocia (AD 1327) and then archon of Athens (AD 14849), records (Anabasis 7.16.1: p. 19) that in 323 BC Alexander sent a party to the Caspian sea to build long ships i.e. warships both aphract and cataphract in the Hellenic mode ( o ). Since Alexander at this time (p. 11) was building a great harbour at Babylon for the contemporary warship types, threes, fours and fives, some brought overland from Phoenicia, and planning a great fleet of sevens, possibly tens as well, it is reasonable to recognise that at any rate some of the warships in common use were of the Hellenic mode and some were not.

Aristotle knew that fours were of Carthaginian design (Frg. 600); and one of the more startling results of our investigation has been the recognition that the five which played so large a part in the naval history of Rome was not the Greek five invented by Dionysius of Syracuse but a five the design of which was derived by Rome from Carthage. It also seems likely that the Carthaginian design of the five came from her mother city Tyre and can be traced in the Phoenician iconography of the last half of the 4th century BC. Nevertheless this ship of Phoenician design and ancestry has her place in history as the warship in which Rome achieved her command of the Mediterranean. Greek and Roman Oared Warships is accordingly a not inappropriate title for a book which relates the steps of that achievement and ventures to challenge Theodore Mommsens dictum that the marine always remained the weak side of Roman warlike organisation.

Our purpose is to present, as the result of the better understanding of the , now achieved by the construction and sea trials of Olympias, a better account of the later ships than currently given and accepted. They, like the , played a central role in their time, during which sea-power determined a great part of the course of history.

For convenience sake we shall call warships twos, threes, fours, fives and so on according to the number of files of oarsmen rowing on each side of the ship. We shall also follow Lionel Cassons good example and use the miscegenic but convenient term polyreme to mean all warships with more than one man to an oar, the innovation which sparked off the developments in naval architecture of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.