Episode notes
The trireme, a warship with three overlapping banks of oars, dominated the Mediterranean from the seventh through the fourth centuries BC and became the foundation of the Athenian Empire. About 37 meters long and only six meters wide, it was built from light pine and fir using a shell-first mortise and tenon method that took roughly 6,000 man-days per hull. A 47 millimeter cable called the hypozomata, cranked to about 13.5 tons of tension, ran from bow to stern to resist hogging and sagging, and exporting these cables from Athens was a capital offense. The crew of about 200 included 170 rowers, overwhelmingly free, paid citizens and resident foreigners, stacked in three tiers as thranites, zygites, and thalamites, with 108 of them unable to see the water and keeping time to a piper and chants recorded by Aristophanes.
Pine soaked up water and the hull had no cargo room, so a fleet had to beach every night, and that weakness shaped both its tactics and its defeat. Athenian crews stripped sails and masts before battle and used the periplus and diekplous to shear enemy oars with the bronze ram, while Sparta and Persia packed their decks with hoplites and archers. Themistocles poured a silver mine windfall into 200 triremes that won at Salamis, but at Aegospotami a Persian-funded Spartan fleet caught the Athenians beached while crews foraged for water and took 170 ships in a single day. In the 1980s the full-scale replica Olympias reached nine knots with a volunteer crew and turned 180 degrees in 60 seconds.
- Ramming at a 60 degree angle needed only four knots to break through, while a 30 degree angle demanded eight.
- Each crewman needed about two gallons of fresh water a day.
- Victors often cut off the right hand or thumb of captured rowers so they could never row again.
- A team of 140 men could carry a trireme out of the water.
- Modern rowers on Olympias felt cramped because they average about two inches taller than ancient Greeks.