A trireme was about 120 feet long and 15 wide. Any longer and it would be too heavy and less maneuverable; any shorter and it would have fewer oarsmen and so would have been slower. Its crew typically numbered 170 rowers, usually drawn from the lower classes but also from foreign recruits, some officers, and ten marine hoplites.
The oarsmen sat one above the other in three rows, the two lowest inside the hull and the top row on an outrigger. The men on the outriggers were the only ones able to see the oars strike the water and they supervised and managed the two oarsmen below. The word “trireme” refers to these groups of three.
A trireme could reach eight miles an hour, but cruise more comfortably at about six—or four if rest breaks were rotated for the crew. Everything depended on the weather, but should they row for eight hours, they might travel between eighty and a hundred kilometers in a day. In an emergency and with an experienced crew and a new ship, this distance could be doubled.
The trireme had some near-fatal shortcomings. First of all, it was labor-intensive and extremely expensive to run. A crewman might earn a daily rate of one drachma, and so it could cost a talent to fund merely one trireme for a month. It follows that a flotilla of ten galleys would cost thirty talents for a three-month campaign. A fleet of two hundred ships employed up to forty thousand men and would quickly bankrupt the treasury of most Greek city-states as well as using up more or less all their manpower. A serious defeat or the destruction caused by a storm could produce eye-watering casualties.
Technical deficiencies weakened the potential of the trireme. It required costly and time-consuming upkeep. Sails, rudders, ropes, oars, and masts sometimes had to be replaced in mid-campaign. Hulls would become waterlogged if they stayed in the sea for too long. In order to prevent this from happening, ships had to be pulled from the water every night to dry out. The use of light woods meant that this could be done without too much difficulty, but it left them vulnerable to surprise attacks.
Also the space on board was so cramped that the oarsmen had to be allowed to disembark for various necessary purposes. There was only sufficient storage space for water (two gallons a head per diem) and crews ate and slept ashore. A modern replica of a trireme has been taken out to sea. Volunteer rowers found the stench and heat in their close quarters almost unbearable (of course, we may have higher expectations of tolerable conditions than people did two thousand years ago).
Designed for speed rather than durability, triremes were more likely to be damaged and sunk by storms than by the enemy. Katabatic, or “fall” winds, which rush down vertically at hurricane speeds out of a blue sky, were as lethal then as they are to today’s holiday yachts. No Greek fleet would venture out of harbor during the winter months.
In effect, the trireme was a day boat suitable only for summer sailing.
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The personality of Aristides could not have been more different from that of his political rival, the wily and imaginative Themistocles. He was a conservative and incorruptible—so much so that he was nicknamed the Just. He was a close friend and follower of Cleisthenes, but if he applauded his democratic reforms at the time he later changed his mind. The man he most admired was the (probably) mythical author of the Spartan constitution, Lycurgus, and he had little sympathy with popular rule.
He made a point of refusing to give or receive favors. Once he was prosecuting a personal enemy in the courts. The jury refused to listen to the defense and insisted on delivering a verdict immediately. Aristides jumped up and supported the defendant’s right to a hearing. On another occasion, when he was acting as arbitrator between two parties, one of them observed that his opponent had done Aristides considerable harm.
“Don’t bother me with that,” he replied. “Tell me what harm he has done you. I’m here to judge your case, not mine.”
Relations between Aristides and Themistocles were cool. Apparently in their youth they fell in love with the same teenager, one Stesilaus of the island of Ceos, and their rivalry continued long after the boy had lost his looks.
The fact that they could not get on with one another is not enough to account for their disagreements. They quarreled on policy too, although the ancient sources do not spell this out. There was a distinction of class, with Aristides defending the aristocracy and Themistocles the lower orders. It is likely that Aristides spoke for the affluent hoplite and attacked the expensive new maritime policy that Themistocles was promoting.
He was not its only opponent. Domestic politics in the ten years following Marathon were poisonous and at last someone seized the weapon of ostracism that Cleisthenes had invented at the time of his reforms, but had lain unused for nearly twenty years (see this page). In vote after vote, there was a ruthless clear-out of aristocratic political leaders, usually on the grounds that they were “friends of the tyrants.” This is odd because some of those ostracized were Alcmaeonids either by blood or by marriage. How can this be, one wonders, when the clan had consistently opposed Pisistratus and his sons for many years past and had suffered exile and persecution as a result?
The answer can only be guessed, but it is a plausible guess. Thanks to the fact that old Hippias, well past his use-by date, had settled at the Persian court and had hoped to be restored to power by Datis and Artaphernes during the Marathon campaign, to be a “friend of the tyrants” meant having pro-Persian sympathies rather than actually wanting to bring back the superannuated system of tyranny. This was why some said it was an Alcmaeonid who flashed a bronze shield from the hills above the battlefield at Marathon. However, it is perfectly conceivable that the Alcmaeonids profoundly disagreed with Themistocles’ confrontational attitude towards the Great King. It was no treason to judge that Athens would not be able to repel a new invasion on a larger scale than the first time around and to argue that it was foolish to provoke Xerxes. In fact, it could be seen as common sense.
It is likely that Themistocles was behind the ostracisms, but he surely knew he was taking a terrible risk. He was deploying a weapon that could easily rebound on the one who wielded it. But he must have felt he had no choice: he knew that his policy to create a large fleet was right and he would do anything to ensure that it was implemented.
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Modern archaeologists have unearthed a treasure trove of more than eleven thousand ostraca, or potsherds, among the city’s ruins, on which are scratched the names of those proposed for exile. Some fragments fit together; curiously the names of political enemies appear on adjoining pieces. At first sight this is mystifying; but evidently commercially minded Athenians manufactured ostraca for general sale to citizens during ostracism campaigns.
Some potsherds have gossipy comments scratched on them as well as names. So the young Alcmaeonid Megacles, nephew of Cleisthenes, is accused of adultery, greed for money, and an offensively lavish lifestyle. He was stigmatized as being “accursed” (the long-ago crime of murdering the followers of Cylon in sanctuary still stirred high emotions). He was even criticized for rearing horses. This seems unfair, for in 486, not long after his ostracism, he won the chariot race at the Pythian Games in Delphi, which not only conferred great prestige on the victor, but also on his polis.
Pindar, poet laureate of athletes, celebrated the event in language of which the fiercest Athenian patriot would approve. He opened: