The Glory That Was Greece

By Anastasia Toufexis

Ancient Greece seemed to come back to life as the ungainly wooden ship glided across the harbor. Her prow bore a threatening ram, her stern a boastful curve and her sides bristled with 170 oars. The launching two weeks ago of the trireme,* a replica of the fabled warship that helped the Athenian navy dominate the Mediterranean during the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., was the culmination of a five-year project. As the ship's oars plunged into the wine- dark waters off the island of Poros, John Morrison, the retired Cambridge classics don who helped lead the effort, sat on deck and exulted, "Can you feel the push?"

For centuries, the precise design of the trireme has posed a baffling mystery. Underwater archaeologists have found the wracks of ancient, sail- driven merchantmen but no remains of the oar-studded warships. Vase paintings, coins, classical writings, excavations at ancient ship sheds and inscribed- stone inventories of the Piraeus dockyards have contributed some ideas. Scholars know that trireme hulls were light, long and slender, displacing some 22 tons, measuring about 123 ft. in length and 19 ft. at the beam, with a draft of slightly more than 4 ft.

The most vexing question was the arrangement of the oars: Were there three men to an oar? Three oars to a single port? Or three tiers of oarsmen, each with a single oar? Five years ago, guests at a dinner party in Britain spent much of the evening arguing over the issue. Host

Frank Welsh, a writer, decided that the only way to settle the debate was to build a trireme. So he called upon Morrison, an expert on ancient Greek ships and a longtime supporter of the three-tier theory. Morrison brought in John Coates, retired chief naval architect to the British Ministry of Defense.

The three staged a symposium on triremes that attracted scholars from Greece and eventually led to the construction of a small section of the warship, which was successfully tested on the Thames. Intrigued by the undertaking, Greek officials offered to build an entire trireme. The actual building process, which took two years and about $700,000, hewed closely to original techniques, using Oregon pine (Mediterranean pines no longer grow tall and straight enough), 22,000 oak dowels and 17,000 handmade nails. A major deviation: the builders substituted steel rope for the hypozomata, the two lengths of twisted flax rope that ran from stem to stern to help hold the trireme together. Says Coates of the ancient mariners: "Oh, they were very, very good indeed. The design was driven to the limit. It was built for speed."

Ancient triremes reportedly cruised up to 18 hours at a steady 7 to 8 knots. Using scale models, British and Greek scientists calculate that fully outfitted boats could have attained a top speed of almost 10 knots. "Of course," says Lieut. Commander Spyros Platis, the Greek navy's supervisor on the project, "this would be at the peak of the oarsmen's output, which couldn't last for more than a minute."

To achieve that speed, the trireme's rowers would have to maintain a pace of at least 40 strokes a minute. Many of the 130 men and 40 women in the crew, mostly youthful British volunteers, are skilled racing oarsmen. Even so, handling the as yet unnamed trireme, which will be commissioned later this month, proved to be daunting. The seats do not move, as in modern shells, and the space between them is so small that oarsmen cannot move their bodies. The two bottom tiers of oarsmen must row blind. Guidance comes from the top level of rowers, who can see when the oars -- which are only 12 inches apart -- are overlapping. Those on the lowest tier suffer the most: beams lie behind their heads, and the weight of the oar can force the handle up under their chins, resulting in nasty bumps.

Worse, commands yelled from the stern carry poorly through the ship. The ancient who gave orders, notes Morrison, "must have had a very loud voice and throat pastilles." Still, the bruised and weary crew seemed to be catching on. After a week of trials, it achieved a rhythmic 28 to 30 strokes a minute and a top speed of 21.7 knots in the stripped-down vessel. Everyone cheered. "See," crowed Morrison, "it works!"

FOOTNOTE: *Though the Greek word for this type of ship is trieres, it is more commonly known as a trireme, derived from the Latin triremis, meaning having three banks of oars.

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London and Mirka Gondicas/Poros