Ancient Greek Warship 500–322 BC

Osprey New Vanguard #132

by Nic Fields, Peter Bull (Illustrator)

Formidable and sophisticated, triremes were the deadliest battleship of the ancient world, and at the height of their success, the Athenians were the dominant exponents of their devastating power. Primarily longships designed to fight under oar power, the trireme was built for lightness and strength; ship-timber was mostly softwoods such as poplar, pine and fir, while the oars and mast were made out of fir. Their main weapon was a bronze-plated ram situated at the prow.

From the combined Greek naval victory at Salamis (480 BC), through the Peloponnesian War, and up until the terrible defeat by the Macedonians at Amorgos, the Athenian trireme was an object of dread to its enemies.

This book offers a complete analysis and insight into the most potent battleship of its time; the weapon by which Athens achieved, maintained, and ultimately lost its power and prosperity.

Genres: History, Military History

48 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2007

About the author

Dr Nic Fields started his career as a biochemist before joining the Royal Marines. Having left the Navy, he went back to University and completed a BA and PhD in Ancient History at the University of Newcastle. He was Assistant Director at the British School of Archaeology, Athens, and is now a lecturer in Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.

Reviews

[Joe Krakovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

ANCIENT GREEK WARSHIP 500 - 322 BC not only explains how their ships were made, manned, and used in war, but also mentions the Olympias, which is the reconstruction of an Athenian trireme by the modern Greek navy. Harbor installations are covered as well. Plenty of photos and color plates support the text.

I have to admire how certain ships have been built in certain ways to serve various purposes throughout history. The ships built by Greece in ancient times allowed them to control the Mediterranean. Their ships were called triremes, as they had three rows of men rowing on each side. The bireme had two rows on each side, but weren't as common. In spite of having a crew of 200 men, of which 170 were rowers, the triremes were narrow and light. Even if holed at the waterline they might not sink. Sails were only used in transit and often stored ashore before a battle. In those days ships traveled close to shore in case of sudden storms and come nightfall they would pull ashore for the night. Due to the way they were made, and to protect the wood from worms as well as to keep from becoming waterlogged, the ships could be taken ashore on any stretch of sandy beach. The hulls were painted black with pitch for further protection as well. Anyone reading Homer would now understand why certain things were mentioned.

Due to the discovery of a rich silver deposit Athens was able to build a rather large navy. The government built the ships, the rich paid for the supplies and upkeep and the poor served as crew or rowers. Unlike later periods in history, slaves were not forced to row. Being an oarsman was a matter of pride.

Those rowing were professionals, as funny as that may sound. They could row long distances and build up the perfect speed for ramming. If their ship was not moving fast enough the impact would do more damage to their own ship than the enemy. If they were going too fast their ram would penetrate too deep into the target making it too difficult to pull free. Three rows of men sitting slightly above each other had to be in perfect harmony with the flute player playing out the rhythm. As there were only about 14 armed men on board, the bronze ram on the front of the ship was the main weapon. What I found surprising is that present day experienced rowers could not match the speed nor the endurance of the ancients on the Olympias. Of course the ancients rowed as if their lives depended on it.

This was a great book.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Triremes are the absolute coolest ships, bar none.

Designed to wreck anything else in the water but so bad at sailing you had to take them out and dry the hull every single day.

You can design them with a ram to sink other ships or a spur to ride up alongside it to snap off all the oars but if you don't coat the it in pitch every single day then you've got about a week tops before the pine beetles chew through the hull.

You want to carry up to 70 marines to Sicily? Alright hop on guys! Oh you might to maneuver? 14 tops, 4 archers to protect the extremely exposed helmsman, everyone else needs to find a seat so we don't capsize.

You can either ram or carry marines. To ram you have to hit minimum speed of 10 knots (fast) or else your own ship crumples. You also have to get your own oar guys backpedaling immediately before impact or your ship gets stuck. But these guys loved ramming.

[John Tepper Marlin]

During the first two weeks of January, when the sun went down in Florida, I read Ancient Greek Warship by Nic Fields, with illustrations by Peter Bull (Osprey, 2007).

When I was a college freshman in 1958, with six years of Greek dating from my student days in Britain, I took a course in Greek history with Professor Sterling Dow, who died in 1995. He encouraged me to research the Greek trireme and sent me to musty issues of the Mariner's Mirror in Widener Library.

At that time the conventional wisdom is that no one really understood how the Greek trireme worked, because when a Hellenophilic industrialist financed a model of it, the ship went straight down into the sea.

Yet the trireme must have worked because it was the warship of choice in the sea battle at Salamis between the Greeks and the Persians. Xerxes set out in the Second Persian Invasion in 480 BC with perhaps 1,200 triremes, and by the time he confronted the Greek allies at Salamis he had 600-800 triremes at his disposal, against fewer than 400 triremes among the allies. The Greeks, led by the Athenians under Themistocles, won a decisive victory that is viewed as the turning point in the invasion. Had the Persians not been routed, the flowering of Athenian literature and culture might never have happened.

Nic Fields's book shows how much more we understand the triremes today than we did in 1958. A working model of a trireme was built, the Olympias, based on evidence assembled by John Morrison, former President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. It was commissioned by the Greek Navy in 1987 and went through five sea trials.

Triremes were 120 feet in length, with a 12-foot beam and three extra feet on either side from outriggers. There were three staggered banks of oarsman with about 25 on each side for the bottom two banks and 30 on the top bank. The trireme usually had a mast available for sailing in transit to the locus of battle, but it could be removed and their main power during battle was from the oarsmen. Compared with modern rowing shells, the problem with the ancient triremes is that they are presumed to have had fixed benches. The volunteer rowers (the Greeks did not use slaves for this function) were constrained in movement. They must have required a great deal of water since a rower requires a liter per hour. Salt may well have been added to the water. The lowest deck of the trireme is assumed to have used a leather casing to prevent water coming through the porthole.

The trireme had a battering ram at the front end, which was made of wood in the shape of a snout, with bronze sheathing. The usual goal of the warship was to put a hole in the opposing ship, which would make it impossible to steer or advance. To avoid being trapped in an embrace with the ship being rammed, the oarsmen would try to back away at the moment of impact. The trireme was not very seaworthy and was not meant for long distances. It was primarily a defensive navy although it was used to attack nearby ports.

Some heavier triremes were used to transport a greater number of hoplites (soldiers, marines), who would board the opposing ship.This was the tactic used by the ships from Chios. This approach became more common as time went on and then the decks were made suitable for carrying catapults, or more marines, or archers.

At Salamis the victory over the the Persians has been attributed to the Greeks maneuvering the Persian fleet into a situation where they could not utilize their greater numbers - much as the Spartans at Thermopylae were able to hold off the Persian army by defending a pass where only a few Persian soldiers could pass at a time. By some accounts the Persian triremes were better built than the Greek ones and the crews were well trained, able to do the complex maneuvers that the triremes were capable of with the right helmsman.

The trireme was financed and outfitted by one of the wealthy people in the community. In Athens about 400 people qualified to pay for a trireme. It was a great honor. The city-state paid for the oarsmen and the rest of the crew. The person so honored served as a trierarch for one year of the sponsored ship. This great honor in time became a burden, and Athenian citizens would try to finance a single trireme jointly, the way two yachtsmen might buy a boat together.

This useful book is in the proud tradition of Osprey Publishing, which seems to have a book on every significant battle ever fought.

However, I missed seeing in the book any discussion of the the trihemiolia, the lighter triremes that were used to go after pirates in the post-Peloponnesian war era, when the enemy were privateers (filibusters) and faster ships were required with fewer soldiers aboard. From other sources, and from two visits I have made to Lindos on the island of Rhodes, the trihemiolia was lighter and used two rowers per oar to dispense with one of the banks of oarsmen. The idea was that as the needs changed from having two battle lines of hundreds of ships to pursuing isolated pirates, a different type of ship was needed.

That might be a metaphor for what the Department of Defense is facing as the world moves into a post-Cold-War, post-nuclear-weapons phase of hunting down irregular soldiers and rogue privateers.

[The Phoenix · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really good book about the Ancient Triremes. It contains everything that is known about them. What they were made of, how they were made, how they looked, how they were used, who used them, etc.. I had recently watched a documentary about the Athenian Empire, so was familiar with the reference to the trireme, but did not know details. This answered any questions I had. I recommend this book to anyone interested in ancient warships or military history.

[Sleepy Boy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good snap shot of Greek Triremes, excellent artwork, ok text.

[Koit · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I find this a good introduction to Athenian ships, I find the book does a less good work on actually fulfilling its promise on discussing "Greek" ships. Overall, the ships' military performance is not very well assessed with Corinth and Corcyra not mentioned except in a few short paragraphs. However, speaking historiographically, some other conclusions Mr Fields made sound more like conjecture than actual science, and I feel that quite a few other books are a better look at Athenian triremes (which is invariably the city and ship this book focusses on) and at least do not pretend to deal with other topics.

I will briefly mention the other topics: Mr Fields describes "positive buoyancy" as the main reason why triremes have not come through the ages, while it has always been my understanding that the salinity of the Mediterranean along with the biological organisms there (vis-a-vis the low salinity Baltic Sea and the oxygen-deprived Black Sea, for example) are the main reason why wooden ships in the area have not been well preserved (in general).

Secondly, Mr Fields also makes it sound as if the trireme was the cause for the Athenian defeat in the Syracusan Expedition, and that is not quite how I would read Thucydides (who admittedly is not the most unbiased author). There are some other similar claims made about other battles along with not mentioning some of the most famous Themistoclean statements on triremes which one should consider a mainstay of any book on Athenian navies. Also, I find Mr Fields' incapability to not refer to Athens as an "empire" quite poor, especially where in a book of this length accuracy of statements should be paramount (hence, "Athens and Her Allies"...).

Lastly, Mr Fields says that "control of the seas in the modern sense was impossible for a trireme navy". This could be the beginning of a discussion longer than any worthy of this post here, but in short, I think he is wrong. I think that conceptually war had a different purpose in that time and age, and no one even thought of a "control of the seas" à la Mahan.

The illustrations, however, are superb as ever.

[Rohit Shinde · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief history of Greek Warships. This would qualify more as an essay rather than a book. It is a booklet, not even a book.
Nevertheless, it is quite informative.