Quinquereme: Encyclopedia II - Quinquereme - Construction

Quinquereme - Construction

In the 4th century BC, after the Peloponnesian War, there was a shortage of oarsmen of sufficient skill to man large navies of triremes. The search for designs of galley that would allow oarsmen to use muscle power instead of skill led Dionysius of Syracuse to build tetreres (quadriremes) and penteres (quinqueremes). For a long time, modern scholars were confused by the word penteres. If they were analogous to trieres (triremes) they would have had five rows of oars, but such a galley would surely have been impossible to construct and impossibly unstable. Later accounts talk about hexeres, hepteres and even larger galleys than those; clearly a different classification scheme was in operation.

There are no explicit descriptions or archeological remains of quinqueremes, so the construction is unclear. According to modern historians, the numbers used to describe galleys counted the number of rows of men on each side, and not the numbers of oars. There were thus three possible designs of quadrireme: one row of oars with four men on each oar, two rows of oars with two men on each oar or three rows of oars with two men pulling the top oars on each side (probably galleys of all three designs were built). Quinqueremes are thought to have had three rows of oars, with two men pulling each of the top two oars.

It had become apparent at the Battle of Syracuse in 413 BC that the topmost tier of rowers, the thranites, were vulnerable to attack by arrows and catapults, so the newer vessels completely enclosed all the rowers below the deck. According to Polybius, a quinquereme had a complement of 300 oarsmen, 120 marines, and 50 crew. Historian Fik Meijer suggests that on each side of a quinquereme there would have been 58 thranites pulling 29 oars, 58 zygites (the middle row of oarsmen) pulling 29 oars and 34 thalamites (the bottom row) with an oar each.

Quinqueremes were even more difficult to make stable than triremes, and the increase in speed was not so great as to give the larger galleys much of an advantage. Perhaps the Greeks were conservative in their innovation, or perhaps they simply had enough trained oarsmen to row their triremes; certainly quinqueremes were not produced in large numbers, and triremes remained the mainstay of the Mediterranean navies.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Construction", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki