PTOLEMY'S GALLEY. 



75 



cient to manage an oar thus unequally poised, the fabulists 

 assert that the handles were made of lead, that the equilibrium 

 might be restored. What the story thus gains in weight, how- 

 ever, it certainly loses in credibility. Oars of seventy feet 

 were out of the question, even in the heroic ages. Their 

 number was equally extraordinary, for they counted no less 

 than four thousand, and were managed by four thousand men. 

 Besides these, there were two thousand eight hundred and fifty 

 combatants collected in castles and behind her bulwarks. She 

 had four rudders, each forty-five feet long, and a double prow. 

 This last feature would have been an impediment instead of an 

 advantage, as the re-entering angles of the two prows would 

 have presented a very violent resistance to the water, which, 

 in its turn, would have exerted a great power to separate them. 

 Her stern was said to have been decorated with resplendent 

 paintings of terrible and fantastic animals, her oars to have 

 protruded through masses of foliage, and, as if she was not 

 already overladen, her hold was declared to have contained 

 huge quantities of grain. A critical comparison has shown that 

 this famous galley could not have turned her head from west to 

 east without describing an enormous orbit and occupying a full 

 hour in the manoeuvre. Indeed, had the Egyptians been foolish 

 enough to build such a ship, they would not have been fortunate 

 enough to navigate her. 



Nevertheless, as it is quite clear that Ptolemy did construct a 

 galley of unusual size and capacity, modern commentators have 

 earnestly sought to explain away the glaring exaggerations and 

 impossibilities of the description given by Callixenus. The 

 chief difficulty lay in the forty tiers of oars and in the four 

 thousand oarsmen. The engraving upon the opposite page gives 

 a representation of the Ptolemy, as she may reasonably be sup- 

 posed to have appeared. Instead of forty tiers, she has, when 

 thus restored, forty groups of oars: with this substitution, and 

 a liberal diminution in the aggregate number, it is not impro- 



