acherib, and we have the distinct authority of
Herodotus for the statement that they were also employed in the Persian
War; for, he relates that Xerxes returned to Asia in a Phoenician
ship, and that great danger arose during a storm, the vessel having been
top-heavy owing to the deck being crowded with Persian nobles who
returned with the king.

[Illustration: FIG. 11.--Galley showing deck and superstructure. About
600 B.C. _From an Etruscan imitation of a Greek vase._]

Fig. 11, which represents a bireme, taken from an ancient Etruscan
imitation of a Greek vase of about 600 B.C., clearly shows soldiers
fighting, both on the deck proper and on a raised, or flying,
forecastle.

In addition to the triremes, of which not a single illustration of
earlier date than the Christian era is known to be in existence, both
Greeks and Persians, during the wars in the early part of the fifth
century B.C., used fifty-oared ships called penteconters, in which the
oars were supposed to have been arranged in one tier. About a century
and a half after the battle of Salamis, in 330 B.C., the Athenians
commenced to build ships with four banks, and five years later they
advanced to five banks. This is proved by the extant inventories of the
Athenian dockyards. According to Diodoros, they were in use in the
Syracusan fleet in 398 B.C. Diodoros, however, died nearly 350 years
after this epoch, and his account must, therefore, be received with
caution.

The evidence in favour of the existence of galleys having more than five
superimposed banks of oars is very slight.

Alexander the Great is said by most of his biographers to have used
ships with five banks of oars; but Quintus Curtius states that, in 323
B.C., the Macedonian king built a fleet of seven-banked galleys on the
Euphrates. Quintus Curtius is supposed by the best authorities to have
lived five centuries after the time of Alexander, and therefore his
account of these ships cannot be accepted without question.

It is also related by Diodoros that there were ships of six and seven
banks in the fleet of Demetrios Poliorcetes at a battle off Cyprus in
306 B.C., and that Antigonos, the father of Poliorcetes, had ships of
eleven and twelve banks. We have seen, however, that Diodoros died about
two and a half centuries after this period. Pliny, who lived from 61 to
115 A.D., increases the number of banks in the ships of the opposing
fleets at this battle to twelve and fifteen banks r