Dr DONALDSON, ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE ATHENIAN TRIREME. 85 



was an extension, and which kept its place by the side of the trireme, was the penteconter or 

 single-banked galley with fifty rowers. The short flat-bottomed barges of the earliest sea- 

 men were not adapted either for rapid navigation or for warfare. And as soon as the 

 Greek mariners put out to sea either to trade with or to plunder distant cities, they seem to 

 have adopted the long sharp-prowed vessel with its twenty-five rowers on each side. Herodotus 

 says expressly that the Phocaeans, who navigated the Archipelago, the Adriatic, and the 

 western Mediterranean as far as Tartessus, used for this purpose ov aTpoyyiiXricri vrjvai, aWd 

 ■n-evTrjKovTopoKTi (i. 163)", and the mythical Argo, which represents the first of those voyages, 

 half piratical, half commercial, which the Thessalians made into the Black Sea, was undoubt- 

 edly regarded as a penteconter. The tradition generally reckons fifty Argonauts, and it was 

 not without a distinct reference to this, that Pindar describes the dragon killed by Jason as 

 "bigger in length and breadth than a penteconter, which blows of steel have perfected" 

 {Pyth. IV. 255). In these galleys it is presumed that all the rowers were armed men, and 

 Homer is careful to tell us this in speaking of the penteconters which Philoctetes took to 

 Troy {II. II. 227). Whether the ships of the Boeotians, to which Homer gives a complement 

 of 120 men (7^. ii. l6), were biremes, or large penteconters, with double crews, is a point 

 which can hardly be decided; Pliny mentions {H. iV. vii. 57), on the authority of Damastes, a 

 contemporary of Herodotus, that the Erythrseans were the first to introduce biremes, but we 

 do not know when this form was originally adopted, and it is clear that the galley with two 

 banks was never very common. And Thucydides seems to have understood that the pente- 

 conters only were rowed by the soldiers, who in that case were bowmen, so that the other 

 vessels would contain, beside the rowers, who served as archers, some seventy hoplites, who 

 only pulled on an emergency. There is a special reason for coming t& this conclusion. 

 Thucydides (i. 10) speaks of the TreoiVe^ or supernumeraries in the ships which went to Troy, 

 and limits them to the kings and their suite. But the Scholiast says that this term included 

 all the eir'ifiaTai or soldiers on board. Now in the nautical inscriptions published by Bockh, 

 we have a particular class of oars called by this name, a\ irepiveip Kwirai, and it is probable 

 that these were intended to be used by the synonymous eirifiaTcu whenever additional hands 

 were wanted, to make head against wind or tide. 



All things considered, we may take the penteconter as the oldest and most permanent type 

 of the Greek war-ship. Both with regard to the number of the crew, and the vessel's length 

 and breadth of beam, it was the basis or starting-point of the trireme. The crew of the 

 trireme consisted of about 170 rowers and 30 supernumeraries. As the length of the vessel 

 over all from forecastle to poop was greater than that of its keel, there were more seats for 

 rowers in the upper tier than in the two lower tiers, and the Scholiast on Aristophanes 

 {Ran. 1074) tells us that at the stern the first thranite sat before the first zygite, and the first 

 zygite before the first thalamite. It seems indeed that there were 62 Opavtrai, or bench- 

 rowers, in the highest tier, 54 ^vylTai or cross-bit-rowers, on the second tier, and the same 

 number of OaXanlTat, or main-hold-rowers, on the lowest tier. Unless then some of the 

 thranites were employed to work the two great oars, or irti^aXia, at the stern, they must have 

 had four ports on each side more than the lower tiers. Supposing that the penteconter had 

 exactly 50 rowers, it must have been nearly as long as the trireme, for it had 25 ports or 



