The Classical Quinquereme: A Single-Level Galley?
Roman Galleys from a fresco from Pompeii
For almost three hundred years, the trireme was the standard warship of the Mediterranean powers. It was used most famously in the Battle of Salamis, during which the united Greek city states defeated the Persians in 480 BC. Now, most readers of ancient history are familiar with the trireme, a galley that is now agreed to have been rowed by a crew of oarsmen sitting at three different levels. Olympias, a modern reconstruction whose performance does not approach that reported of triremes in ancient times, has all the same shown that it is possible for three levels of oarsmen, closely staggered by height and lateral position, to propel a ship, and this is almost certainly what the classical Greeks and Phoenicians did.
Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse (ca. 432 to 367 BC), was inspired by his struggle with Carthage for control of Sicily to solicit craftsmen to come to Syracuse and devise new weapons. Among them were the catapult and warships larger than the trireme and, in some sense, rowed by “fours” and “fives.” In Greek they were called tetreres and penteres; they are commonly called quadriremes and quinqueremes, names derived from their Latin equivalents.
As a matter of engineering it is agreed that, a galley cannot operate with oars on more than three levels because, at four levels, the topmost oars must be dipped at too steep an angle to work efficiently. So how were “five-fitted” (or the “four-fitted” quadrireme) ships rowed? The most common answer is that extra rowers were added to the trireme, so that, in the case of a quinquereme there were two men to each of the highest level of oars and one man to each oar at the bottom level. Such a ship, it seems, need be not much wider than a conventional trireme. In fact, this is likely to have been the solution used by Dionysius’s shipwrights, and the records of the Athenian dockyards from the fourth century indicate that the oars of a trireme could be used in a quadrireme and those of a quadrireme on a quinquereme (those of the corresponding length anyway). But, did such an arrangement continue?
Probably not. The quinquereme and quadrireme were not widely adopted for about a hundred years. Instead, Mediterranean naval fleets continued to depend upon the trireme. But then, the quinquereme became the standard warship of the late Hellenistic period and of the Punic Wars. What changed? Did the Hellenistic powers and the great sea-power Carthage fail to see some advantage in the quinquereme that should have been evident for a century? It seems unlikely. I suggest that the quinquereme (and its somewhat smaller cousin the quadrireme) went on to become the standard war galley for the next three hundred years because it was not built (or no longer built) on three levels. I suggest, instead, that such galleys were rowed by oarsmen at a single level with five men to each large sweep. This was the arrangement in galleys of the Renaissance and later, and there is good reason to suppose that the ancients did the same.
Let’s consider the advantages of such a warship; there are many. First, there is cost. A ship built to accommodate rowers at one level need have only a single deck to support them, not the more elaborate structure with benches or seats at three levels, some within the hull, some at the gunwale and some above. Such a ship could be built more quickly than one for oarsmen at three levels, and this is something to consider when you read ancient accounts of entire fleets of ships built in a few weeks. Even if the accounts exaggerate the speed with which the fleets were built, they do seem to have been built quickly. A simple design would have helped and indeed may have been necessary.
Second is the cost and training of the oarsmen. Oarsmen were paid and, presumably the better trained were paid a bit more. With five men to a sweep, only the man at the end had to be trained; the others provided force. Thus, if a quinquereme had three hundred oarsmen (as is reported in Polybius), only sixty had to be skilled, not, say, 170 as would be the case with a trireme-style ship with a combination of single and double-manned oars. Further to this, an undermanned ship (and this must have been common) could have been easily rowed with fewer than five men to an oar, if needed. Oarsmen injured in battle would not as readily throw off the stroke as would be the case with one or even two men to an oar.
Improved stability is a third advantage. Unquestionably, a hull built to accommodate five men to a sweep, thus ten across with a gangway between them, must be wider than a three-level ship with the same number of men, but this width would conduce to greater stability over the three-level design: the galley would be wider and the oarsmen, who in the aggregate would weigh a great deal (perhaps as much as 18 tons) would be less apt to destabilize a beamier ship. The wider design would, of course, be slower, but the difference in speed may not have been great and the stability gained might have been well worth a loss in speed, particularly in the era during which they were used, an era in which naval battles were often decided by boarding.
The Romans were said to have put 120 marines as a boarding party on each quinquereme during the first Punic War (264-241 BC). Such a troop (about two centuries-worth of men), must have weighed at least 9.5 tons. Smaller boarding parties, even if only half as large, might have weighed as much as 4 tons. It takes little imagination to see the effect of such a weight of men shifting about on deck to see how important the stability of a quinquereme would be. One ancient account reports deck soldiers rushing to one side of a war galley and causing her to capsize. Only a fairly broad vessel sitting low in the water could be stable enough to function with an acceptable margin of safety. A single-level quinquereme, wider and lower than a three-level ship would provide more of this stability, and furthermore, the large sweeps would function much as the oars of racing shell do to stabilize it. It is interesting too that the Romans, as the classical historian Chester Starr noted long ago, seem not to have adopted or adapted to their language the Greek terms for the three different levels of oarsmen found in a trireme (thranites, zygites and thalamites), which terms might have been useful in a larger three-level ship. The classicist W. W. Tarn noted more than a century ago that ships up to the size of a trireme were called, in Latin, minoris formae (lesser shape), while quadriremes and larger galleys were referred to as maioris formae (greater shape). He suggests that the larger galleys propelled by a smaller number of large sweeps had quite a different appearance from the smaller vessels driven by a great number of small one-man oars, a fact reflected in these expressions. It seems to me that he is right.
Now, there are any number of representations of galleys from the ancient world that show oar ports on two, or sometimes three, levels. What they show has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and there can be no doubt that galleys were built with rowers at two or, as with the trireme, three levels. It is not clear, as a rule, what these ships are meant to represent. Some may be biremes, some may be represent the huge ships of the Hellenistic age, “ten-banked” or even larger, ships that may indeed have had more than one level with several men to a sweep.
In summary, for reasons of simplicity and economy, and in the interests of speed in their construction, the single-level quinquereme seems to be the most likely design for the Hellenistic war ship. Add to these factors stability and the strikingly different appearance of such vessels from those smaller ones with single-manned oars, and it seems likely that Hellenistic, Punic and Roman quinqueremes were single-level vessels.
References
· C. Starr, “The Ancient Warship,” Classical Philology, Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 366, (1940)
· W. W. Tarn, “The Greek Warship,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 25, pp. 137-156; pp. 204-224 (1905)
· Trireme Olympias: The Final Report: Sea Trials 1992-4, Conference Papers 1998, ISBN: 1842174347
