Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/333

 "I shall now," he continues, "show how remarkably it agrees with Athenæus; thus taking in the whole range and applying to all, a thing it could never do were it not near the truth. The tesseracontoros having," he adds, "forty banks, five oars to a bench, makes her have two hundred oars of a side, or four hundred in all. Considering her size, she could not have less than ten men to an oar." The Liburnia of Caligula, according to the testimony of Suetonius, had, he states, that number of men to an oar, forgetting that she was a single-banked galley, and consequently he concludes that that number was attached to each of the four hundred oars in Philopator's ship, which "gives four thousand, the number mentioned by Athenæus." Here again he overlooks the impracticability of placing ten men at each of the lower tier of oars.

Now, while there can be no doubt that all vessels had their ports placed obliquely in cases where there were more than one tier of oars; that there were vessels of five tiers of oars thus placed and no more, and that the Grecian trireme had one hundred and fifty rowers, and the Persian two hundred, it is clear from the descriptions of ancient authors that there were many triremes of much smaller dimensions, especially from the facility with which they were hauled upon the beach: while there were others carrying even more men than the galleys he refers to. But presuming Mr. Howell to be correct in his supposition, that a trireme derived her name from "having three rows of five tiers and no more," as he illustrates, then a bireme would derive her