Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/223

 SECOND AND THIRD YEARS OF THE WAR. 20 1 Britical moment was now come, and Phormio gave the signal for attack. He first drove against and disabled one of the admiraFa ships, his comrades next assailed others with equal success, so that the Peloponnesians, confounded and terrified, attempted hardly any resistance, but broke their order and sought safety in flight. They fled partly to Patrae, partly to Dyme, in Achaia, pursued by the Athenians ; who, with scarcely the loss of a man, captured twelve triremes, took aboard and carried away almost the entire crews, and sailed off with them to Molykreium, or Antirrhium, the northern cape at the narrow mouth of the Co- rinthian gulf, opposite to the corresponding cape called Khium in Achaia. Having erected at Antirrhium a trophy for the victory, dedicating one of the captive triremes to Poseidon, they returned to Naupaktus ; while the Peloponnesian ships sailed along the shore from Patrse to Kyllene, the principal port in the territory ner, ch. ix, pp. 94, 104, 115. But there is a great deal still, respecting the equipment of an ancient trireme, unascertained and disputed. Now there was nothing but the voice of the keleustes to keep these one hundred and seventy rowers all to good time with their strokes. With oars of different length, and so many rowers, this must have been no easy mat- ter, and apparently quite impossible, unless the rowers were trained to act together. The difference between those who were so trained and those who were not, must have been immense. We may imagine the difference between the ships of Phormio and those of his enemies, and the difficulty of the latter in contending with the swell of the sea, when we read this description of the ancient trireme. About two hundred men, that is to say, one hundred and seventy rowers and thirty supernumeraries, mostly epibatae or hoplites serving on board, besides the pilot, the man at the ship's bow, the keleustes, etc., probably some half dozen officers, formed the crew of a trireme : compare Herodot. viii, 17 ; vii, 184, where he calculates the thirty epibatse 6 vet and above the two hundred. Dr. Arnold thinks that, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the epibatse on board an Athenian trireme were no more than ten: but this seems not quite made out: see his note on Thucyd. iii, 95. The Venetian galleys in the thirteenth century were manned by about the same number of men. " Les gal&res Venitiens du convoi de Flandre devaient etre monte'es par deux cent hommes libres, dont 180 rameurs, et 12 archers. Les arcs ou balistes furent p?scrits en 1333 pour toutes les galeres de commerce armies." (Depping, Ilistoire du Commerce cntre Ig Levant ctl'Europe, vol. i, p. 163.) 9*