Concept2 Forum

Does anyone know what rowing technique was used in the ancient greek triremes? All of the Hollywood movies show the rowers in non-sliding seats, which would make it very hard for them to generate much power.

I have heard that some Classical scholars believe that they actually used the sliding seat in order to maximize their speed. Does anyone have any reliable information on this question?

The Putney to Mortlake do was on slides for the first time in 1873.

jamesg wrote:The Putney to Mortlake do was on slides for the first time in 1873.

In Triremes?

While the introduction of the sliding seat has certainly sped things up, it also introduced some additional problems to be solved. All the pictures I've seen of Trireme rowing stations have never shown anything resembling a sliding seat. It's just a guess, but with the rather long outboard that appears to be the case, simply getting all the rowers together would be the most avantageous way to increase speed, and a sliding seat would complicate that considerably. For example, there have been racing shells built with capacities up to 24, but they have still not gone faster than the Best M8+'s. I don't know the speeds they achieved, just that it was said they did not beat the 8 man boats. They would likely be better at towing a water skiier with the larg increase of inertia however.

This is what Nikos Konstandaras wrote in Kathimerini on 24 July 2004, just before the Athens Olympics:

In the late afternoon sun, out in Faliron Bay where little sailboats usually play, where tugboats throb along purposefully, a wooden ship appeared suddenly, as if it had been there all along, waiting to be seen.

It was the Olympias, a replica of the ancient Athenian fighting ship known as a trireme. It was out in the bay as the volunteers, all residents of Piraeus, manning its oars practiced for August 11, the day on which their ship will carry the Olympic Flame on its way to the Olympic Stadium and the opening ceremony.

It is a miracle of serendipity that the trireme, commissioned into the Greek Navy in 1987, will play a part in these Games. The original triremes, with their three rows of oarsmen and their fast and maneuverable design, were instrumental in the Athenians’ defeat of the Persians in the Battle of Salamis near here in 480 BC.

In the ensuing peace, Athens became an empire and, at the same time, invented democracy. The fact that the crews of these ships, who were common people and not aristocrats, were now the backbone of the state’s defense led to their being given an equal say in how their state was run.

Although this was limited to male citizens of Athens, it was the first giant step that led to humanity’s emancipation from the bonds of class and luck. When this ship brings in the Olympic Flame, with real people pulling real oars in the sea which gave the world democracy, everything we have been chattering about the past few years will part like a stage curtain as the lights focus on the spectacle and our hearts begin to race.

http://www.atm.ox.ac.uk/rowing/trireme/