Quinquereme: Encyclopedia II - Quinquereme - Polyremes

Quinquereme - Polyremes

The wars of the Diadochi, the successors to the empire of Alexander the Great, caused another arms race. This time the trend was to build bigger and bigger galleys. Macedon was building hexiremes (probably with two men on each of three oars) in 340 BC; by 315 BC Antigonus, the successor to Alexander the Great in Macedon, was building septiremes, which saw action at the Battle of Salamis in Cyprus (306 BC); his son Demetrius, involved in a naval war with Ptolemy of Egypt, built eights (octeres), nines, tens, twelves and finally sixteens!

A change in the technology of conflict had taken place to allow these juggernauts of the seas to be created, as the development of catapults had neutralised the power of the ram, and speed and manoeuvrability were no longer as important as they had been. It was easy to mount catapults on galleys; Alexander the Great had used them to considerable effect when he besieged Tyre from the sea in 332 BC. The catapults did not aim to sink the enemy galleys, but rather to injure or kill the rowers (remember that one rower out of place would ruin the performance of the entire ship and prevent its ram from being effective). Now combat at sea returned to the boarding and fighting that it had been before the development of the ram, and larger galleys could carry more soldiers.

Some of the later galleys were monstrous in size, with oars as long as 17 metres pulled by as many as eight rowers. With so many rowers, if one of them was killed by a catapult shot, the rest could continue and not interrupt the stroke. The innermost oarsman on such a galley had to step forward and back a few paces with each stroke.

The very largest galleys were probably catamarans, according to J. S. Morrison. An account by Memnon describes how Demetrius' rival Lysimachus of Asia Minor built a galley, the Leontophorus, so large it required 1600 rowers and could support 1200 marines. Plutarch described a quadragintareme (forty) built for Ptolemy IV of Egypt in about 200 BC that was 128 m long, required 4,000 rowers and 400 other crew, and could support a force of 3,000 marines on its decks. He wrote, "This ship was only for show. It scarcely differed from buildings which are rooted in the ground and had great difficulty in being put to sea."

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