of those who have dealt with it have been
classical scholars possessing little or no practical acquaintance with
seafaring conditions, and none of their proposed arrangements of three
banks of oars looks at all likely to be workable and effective. A practical
test of the theory was made by Napoleon III when his "History of Julius
Caesar" was being prepared. He had a trireme constructed and tried upon the
Seine. There were three banks of oars, but though the fitting and
arrangement was changed again and again under the joint advice of classical
experts and practical seamen, no satisfactory method of working the
superposed banks of oars could be devised.

The probability is that no such method of working was ever generally
employed, and that the belief in the existence of old-world navies made up
of ships with tier on tier of oars on either side is the outcome of a
misunderstanding as to the meaning of a word. _Trieres_ and _trireme_ seems
at first glance to mean triple-oared, in the sense of the oars being
triplicated; but there are strong arguments for the view that it was not
the oars but the oarsmen, who were arranged in "threes." If this view is
correct, the ancient warship was a galley with a single row of long oars on
either side, and three men pulling together each heavy oar. We know that in
the old navies of the Papal States and the Republics of Venice and Genoa in
the Middle Ages and the days of the Renaissance, and in the royal galleys
of the old French monarchy, there were no ships with superposed banks of
oars, but there were galleys known as "triremes," "quadriremes," and
"pentaremes," driven by long oars each worked by three, four, or five
rowers. It is at least very likely that this was the method adopted in the
warships of still earlier times.

A trireme of the days of the Persian War with fifty or sixty oars would
thus have a crew of 150 or 180 rowers. Add to this some fifty or sixty
fighting men and we have a total crew of over two hundred. In the Persian
navies the rowers were mostly slaves, like the galley slaves of later
times. They were chained to their oars, and kept in order or roused to
exertion by the whip of their taskmasters. To train them to work together
effectively required a long apprenticeship, and in rough water their work
was especially difficult. To miss the regular time of the stroke was
dangerous, for the long oars projecting far inboard would knock down and
injure the nearest rowers