The battle in Rava's cover plate from Osprey NV244 is apparently that at Sena Gallica in 551AD.
I looked further on his FB.
This was a battle between an Italian Gothic fleet and Byzantines. The Goths lost heavily.
This is an obscure battle, mentioned only by Procopius. Quite helpful in making a fantasy-full reconstruction. My criticism of the galea-bireme-dromon ship stands. Elsewhere, Procopius clearly states that the ships of Belisarius reconquista were single-banked, cataphract, with possibly a lateen rig. (History of the Wars, Book III, xi). These were called dromon(es).
The depiction closest in time is here, from the Vatican Æneid folio 77.
A dromon of c.500AD
That the Goths had a fleet of similar vessels to the Byzantines of this time is ... debateable.
It is nice that Procopius mentions the sides engaged with arrows and lances and swords, But fire-projectiles, always a risky tactic at sea ? And super-explodey ones too.
The Gothic ship at lower right is ...odd. Why should a railing run up into the vertical on the stern ? Who is going to fall off sideways there ? And nice uniforms by the Gothic army.
A naughty detail is that the ship at the back - a galea-medieval-dromon , has the upper corne rof its mainsail colourd red. According to Procopius, Vandalic War xi - on his expedition to Africa in 533AD, Belisarius had the sails of his own and two other ships which carried his personal guard coloured red in the top third. Just a leetle tweaking to get his feature over to Sena Gallica eighteen years later.
Red sails in the sunset. (ish)
Anyway, the oncoming book is getting even more interesting.
A sail is sighted over the horizon! A first view of the oncoming Osprey New Vanguard 244 Imperial Roman Warship 193AD to 565AD. Giuseppe Rava has been unable to contain himself and released a view of the cover before the publisher themselves have.
The splendid view of a medieval galea equipped with personal little escape ( or ventilation ? ) doors for the rowers, a spectacular plinth for the bow-ballista near the bows which offers zero protection, a mammoth stern-castle and - a sight not seen for a couple of hundred years ...( and never seen again ..) an oarbox.
Keeping the arrows out !
This oarbox is a special one with an open top. This open top has to be covered with a tarpaulin to keep arrows out. The oars are bizarre - try to extend the angle of the upper oars into the ship and imagine how much space there is to row with the things ......They plunge into the sea at an extreme incline. The lower rank of rowers have it better, they are have little hatches to open if things get too smelly inside. They may even be naked in there ? Their oar shafts are not so steeply inclined so they have it easy. The rig is lateen, so this would argue for the vessel being a dromon but the fact that it is a bireme means it cannot be a dromon.: unless we are in the period well after the stated terminus for the book of 565AD.
Ravenna ships: big brackets for steering oars
The steering oar is acting through a truly massive bracket stuck to the side of the vessel. Looks like a literal interpretation of a mosaic picture.
John Coates as scale for bracket on Olympias
I do not know what the scenario for the picture is - maybe the battle of the Hellespont in 324AD where Constantinian forces defeated those of Licinius: hence the Christian emblems on the main vessel.
The bow of the ship coming into the picture from below is equipped with a forecastle mounting a torsion ballista. The planks that floor this position are something like 10 or 15 cm thick and 60cm wide. They shouldn't break in combat.
The forecast remains bleak for the third New Vanguard by the Deadly Duo, D'Amato and Rava.
Italian Blight; Hot air soon: Poor to severe becoming tragic: Low expectations, filling slowly with dubious interpretations. Text, moderate to dull.
Oh yes,, something I missed from my critique of D'Amato's Repblican Roman Warship Osprey NV225.
The only modern research work dedicated to the navy of the Roman Republic is Christa Steinby's
The Roman Republican Navy: From the Sixth Century to 167 B.C. Commentationes humanarum litterarum, 123. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2007. Pp. 236. ISBN 9789516533509.
This became the Pen and Sword book 'Rome versus Carthage-The War at Sea, (2014).
The bibliography for NV225 does not include this work in either form. How in the world could someone researching this topic not find these reference works. They pop up on a simple web-search. How could a 'professional researcher' not find them and not treat them as a priority for research on this subject. Steinby's work is the only dedicated research on the Republican navy IN 50 YEARS!
D'Amato may have used these works. If so, he ain't telling.
But the bibliography gets more interesting.
Under 'Modern Works' are listed...
Roman Legionary
Imperial Roman Naval Forces
Republican Roman Army
These are all listed as being published in Oxford. No publisher is given.
The Modern Language Association format for a bibliography is
Author's last name, first name. Book title. Additional information. City of publication: Publishing company, publication date.
The Harvard Reference List format is as follows..
Last name, First initial. (Year published). Title. Edition. (Only include the edition if it is not the first edition) City published: Publisher, Page(s).
To go far off these tracks in a commercial, supposedly academic, work is poor practice. It would cost an undergraduate marks on a dissertation. WTF is a a professional writer/academic doing here ?
As you may have guessed, the works referenced above are all OSPREYs. This also means they are also not given their correct titles.For example, the first would be a Warrior series book.
D'Amato's idiosyncratic format for his bibliography omits the publisher.
It may not be a big deal, but if I pick another Osprey off the shelf, by another author, the bibliography format is conventional and complete.
Is anything to be gained by adopting this odd format ?
Well. the monumental work by Morrison and Coates - Greek and Roman Oared Warships, is also listed as originating from Oxford. But there the similarity ends. Morrison and Coates' work is a Monograph published by Oxbow Books., a highly reputable academic publisher.
Is anything to be gained by putting that work on a par with Osprey titles ?
These ARE the illustrations you are looking for...
According to Osprey : "Books in Osprey’s New Vanguard series deal with World War II tanks, AFVs
and ships, as well as covering the vessels of World War I, World War II
and the Napoleonic period, and the artillery and naval innovations of
the American Civil War and medieval periods. Featuring specially
commissioned full colour artworks, including exploded and cutaway
diagrams, books in Osprey’s New Vanguard series are illustrated
throughout with black and white photographs and diagrams. A valuable
resource for model makers, wargamers, and military history enthusiasts."
Somehow these ancient ship books were shoe-horned into this category where they do not belong.
These books contain rare black and white sections which are copies of others' work. They contain no cutaway illustrations and little which ranks so high as a diagram.
There is a species of reader who hold the printed word in awe and dare not criticise the content of books or even web-published material, believe it all, even. I am not one of those.There is a species of reader who are so empathetic that they cannot bear the anguish caused by criticism to others and so avoid it. I am not one of them.
There is a species of reader which considers that anyone presenting information as fact and not fantasy is thereby opening themselves to the slings and arrows of criticism. In this way fact can be discerned from error or fantasy. I am one of those. There is a species of reader who consider that companies and authors who churn-out publications of poor quality while claiming they are the bee's knees and charging cold hard cash for the privilege of consuming this snake oil should get some return fire. I am one of those.
THE TEXT
While not as appalling as the text in NV225, this book has its moments.
p.26 - A division of warships into larger and smaller sizes is misunderstood. D'Amato here includes Fours as 'smaller size' warships according to Livy (37.23.5).This is so basic it makes one's jaw hit the floor.
All over - The type names of ships are spectacularly inconsistent. e.g. liburnica biremis, liburna (biremis), liburnæ, liburnians, liburnicæ biremis, liburna EVEN!..p34. 'a second century liburnæ' This is a supposed Classics scholar - the indefinite article, singular, is used with a plural. Has he any Latin ? This manuscript was written at 2 in the morning after a lot of coffee and never corrected? Various ancient sources may have different words but the author's job is to clarify and unify a text that readers can read without confusion.
p.30 He writes about the Pozzuoli relief ships but doesn't tell that the photos are on page 8. if one did not know what these looked like it would take some time to put the two together.
p.31 Quadriremis 'evolution' - development , surely!, is NOT discussed in a paragraph which has this title. It actually contains a completely confused discussion of Fives. p.32 'The main difference between the liburna and other ships, and especially from the triremes, quadriremes and quinqueremes, was not necessarily its system of oarage, but its construction.'
This sentence has no semantic utility.This is like saying ' the main difference between a tank and a truck is not in the armament and traction systems but the way they are made.' Unclear. Explain. D-
p35. On the ship Nemi II - 'The steering device...was leaning and lashing against the first lower cross beam and against the other two upper beams.' Mystical stuff. Also, too much Nemi in this book. The Nemi ships are pleasure barges. Why drag them in here ? A clue is given on page 42. He appears to think that a) there was only one Nemi ship, when there were two, and b) the Nemi ship, or one of them, was a warship ?.! A warship in an isolated lake ? A warship 70 by 20 metres on a lake of 1.7 square kilometres.....
p.36 The kind of construction used in Roman warships was the 'carvel method'. This is jaw-droppingly wrong. Anyone can check on Wikipedia. Why did the author not do this? There follows a confused description of building technique which I think is a garbled account of the Nemi ships. If someone thinks that the spacing between planks did not exceed 45cm he is obviously never thinking of going to sea in that type of vessel. The description is odd.
Methinks we exceeded the 45cm gap between successive planks. Bugger.
p.38 What is a canteer (sic)?
Maps : LACK OF MAPS!
Despite considering the various fleets in geographical sequence. Despite giving lists of fleet bases. Despite showing a lot of monuments from different places. Despite quoting various ancient authors' accounts of goings on at various places. THERE ARE NO MAPS! Not even one of the Roman Fucking Empire, whose ships are under scrutiny here. Shurely shome mishtake.
Sub Armalis
Maybe the Italian connection makes it essential to include fashion themes in each book. Last time it was Etruscan clothing for sea-going personnel, this season's collection includes the leather shirt found with the Pisa ships interpreted as a 'sub armalis'. Why in God's name would the supposed under-armour garment for a legionary soldier turn up in a backwater dock near boats sunk in a flood but never on a military site ? Can a fisherman/stevedore not have a leather jacket to keep the wind out ?
At last. on page 43 we get to Roman Naval Tactics in the Early Empire
In the whole book there are 20 lines on this subject. For comparison, in this book there are 10 lines on the nails of ships which are not even warships.
Here is a summary of the ridiculousness which ensues
.
Romans did not follow Greek practices. (We are hundreds of years removed here!) They used the discipline and power of their soldiery at sea (sounds like this escaped from the Republican Roman book!). The essential thing was to get close and win with troops. FOR THIS REASON RAMMING WAS USED. This is like saying 'in order to win with skirmishing tactics the Barbarians always ran straight into the enemy lines.' An author who has supposedly studied ancient naval topics has failed to see the contrast - eloquently set-out by Thucydides - that ramming tactics were definitely different from deck-fighting tactics.
But the punchline tells us that the most damaging thing in a naval battle was artillery (tormenta)!! Whaat? ARTILLERY! I can't hear you I'm in the ......
Then why, pray, tell us, have there only been five woolly lines ( p.41) expended on artillery in the whole of the rest of the book and no diagrams or photographs?
Two hopelessly irelevant passages from Cassius Dio are quoted. -Another attempt to produce a rabbit from a hat which fails miserably. How a massacre of small boats by warships and the actions of divers contribute to explaining the broad sweep of Roman Imperial naval tactics beats me. It really does.
That's it. Thats how the Empire of Rome dominated the seas from 27BC to 193AD, using artillery, driving over small boats and pulling ships to shore with cables nailed to their hulls underwater.
OK. Osprey cannot be expected to have peer review, but maybe at least 'brain review' could be applied before publication ?
THE OTHER PLATES
PLATE D has a garbled caption for a Three and confused liburnian. The author is confused about what made a bireme a bireme. Not bad pictures even if wrong in detail.
PLATE E has a Five with FOUR banks of oars. This is plain wrong. It has sails that hang limply and would never work. That is because it is a coloured-in version of John Coates drawing. As appeared in the previous book NV225. The 'Quadriremes'(sic) is not controversial except for the onagers on board and monumental figurehead.
Coates' Five is popular with these boys.
PLATE F shows a liburnian from Trajan's Column combined with Coates' drawing. Hey, you know what ? Its quite nice. There is even a plan view!. Despite the absence of a canopy mentioned in the caption, and the upper oars being wrongly placed. Oh no! It is a 50-oared ship with....48 oars. And one steering oar is missing. But apart from that it is nice.
PLATE G shows an actuaria with a keel so bowed- 'rockered' - it is impossible. It has a ludicrous ram. There are depictions, they have no artemon and no stern castle as shown here. This is an amalgamation of a merchant corbita and an actuaria. Actuaria with less then 30 or so oars- like this one - were called actuariolæ.
It also shows a HEXERIS which is simply copied from Viereck rather than 'based upon'.
Rava 2016
OK it is coloured and has oars. D'Amato and Rava have here not even bothered to add a rig but the Coates Five(Plate E1), even though also with its tower raised as for battle, did get the rig it had in the original drawing.
Where does' based-upon' become copied ? Viereck 1975
Is the job of someone creating 'meticulous new profile art' to create something new and believable or to copy and embellish a bit ?
Viereck's work is now dated. The beam of his ships is usually far too broad, for example.But the artillery which Viereck loved and placed on his ships is not explained in this volume.At no point do these two books offer their own cross-sections and only one plan ..I wonder why ?
Sailing back to the future
PLATE H has a giant Three ramming a Hjørtspring type boat. Hjørstspring boat is dated to 4th century BC. Hmmmmm. Garbled caption.
The photographic material in this book is great. It may be that this justifies buying it if you want a hard copy of many related photos in one place. It is, however, possible to find photos of many of the subjects online with some judicious searching. The authors fail to take advantage of their strength in this area. Two photos of ships from baths at Pompeii on page 41 have not been shown in detail anywhere I have seen. Pity those two photos are not the clearest - in which case,,,how about a line drawing ? Eh ? Eh ? Maybe the artist only does colour plates ?
PARTHIAN SHOT
The bibliography is interesting. It is divided between 'Ancient Roman Sources' and 'Scholarship'.
The format of the scholarship entries is odd. The place of publication is given for all, but the publisher only for a few. This is an undergraduate error. This author holds two PhDs. What is more interesting is that the author has an entry which is published at Oxford. Nice. The book is actually published by Osprey, who also published this book, and the book referred-to in the sole footnote in this book. Are Osprey books scholarship ? Does Oxford look better than Osprey ? Why did the author use such an amateur format for his bibliography? Are PhDs worth the paper they are printed on ?
As I wrote at the top. If someone sells me a cake with a dubious filling they should not be surprised to have it served up for themselves. This redresses several hundred kroner and some hours lost.
The challenge presented to the sculptor of Trajan's Dacian Campaigns Frieze was immense. He had to describe the Emperor's two campaigns, with as much detail as possible on a spiral 'scroll' 190 metres long and between 1 metre high at the base and 1.2 metres high at the top. We will not discuss the immense engineering task involved. We are interested in the problems of depicting landscapes, buildings, transport, men and animals in a series of vignettes which flow into one and other and still make visual sense and satisfy a constrained but lively visual æsthetic.
The first decision was about the level of detail. The sculptor decided to represent the soldier figures at a size where he could render very small details of equipment such as armour construction and hair styles. It could be that this was a prerequisite of the design because many of the faces would be modelled after actual participants. It was certain that the Emperor would be depicted and he should definitely be modelled from life and recogniseable. He crops up 59 times on the monument and so it was abviously an important ´factor that the passing dignitaries and onlookers' kids, could easily pick out Trajan in his cartoon-strip superhero world. This condition meant that the smallest characters would be about half the height of the frieze. Sculpting in stone which is to be plastered and painted cannot go below a level of detail where either the stone edges will easily weather and crumble or the paint and plaster will fill it in. The Emperors face must be large enough to recognise but not so large the other figures appear out of kilter as he performs his feats. A man sixty centimetres high could still be discerned up to the column's 35m top.
Ok why the long paragraph ? Because the men dictate how much space there is left in the frieze for stuff. A weapon a man is holding or horse he is riding stays near to scale, but to save room and to make scenes more meaningful - for example, showing the foot of several fortress walls rather than the whole fortresses - buildings and nature and transport are shrunken down to various proportions. In this way forts, ships and cities can be meaningfully and impactfully presented along side the men who can readily be seen to toil, fight, march, suffer and die before the onlooker. Remember this is the culture that brought you gladitatorial games. The culture that thought watching helpless people being eaten alive was right-on. The culture that, should anyone have suggested the establishment of safe spaces or issuing of trigger warnings at the Colosseum, would probably have dumped the suggesters straight over the parapet onto the sand.
Trajan's architect, possibly Apollodorus of Damascus, had the genius to proffer a bloody and moving spectacle to the citizens of Rome that continued long after the last Dacian captives had expired in the arena. An everyday set of executions in gory colour. A banal and baleful spiral of violence that one could sit and contemplate while eating lunch five days a week. Any Roman confessing himself tired of Trajan's victorious tragedy would indeed be a Roman who was tired of life, and death.
But triremes. What about the bloody triremes ! ? Coming to that. I promise.
The problem of proportions when one looks at anything on Trajan's Column must be considered. When one looks at fortification or engines, for example. Especially when one looks at the ships.
The size of things must be worked-out. Relative to each other and relative to the men in and around them.
PLATE B
The caption to Plate B in NV230 informs us that we are looking at the 'river biremes and triremes of the Classis Pannonica on the Danube.' Both ships are 'copied from Trajan's Column.' There are three ships in the picture. The third is a merchant sailing vessel transporting an enormous radio valve as part of the logistical effort on the campaign.Oh no ! Maybe not , we'll deal with that later...
Actually, on the Column the trireme is only ever shown at sea and not a long way up the Danube.
The nearest ship is a Three, in Roman parlance a trireme. Oarboxes seem to have been dispensed with by Trajan's time and the vessel depicted on the column has two tiers of oars worked through ports and one over the gunwhale. This kind of hull would have been more stable than when the oar-tiers were canted out over each other. All fine and dandy. Apart from the fact the artist has screwed the upper oars in place under the lattice screen - how could they be moved ?
We are lucky- our oars are proportionate
Scale immediately rears its ugly head. The rowers in the ship are like little mice behind bars with their little paws struggling to use the telegraph-pole oars. Nuff said.
Trajan(?) - presumably, and some sailors look up in wonder at a lamp hanging from the aphlaston which is metres above them. The arched shelter is vast. Why should it be so vast ? It will catch wind. It will block sight. Is it so the Emperor can ride into it on horseback ? It takes up too much room. Or maybe the men are dwarves. The aphlaston itself, instead of being a delicate, graceful display of the carpenter's art is a monstrous thing made of giant timber.
The rowers are sitting surrounded by an expanse of deck. The only problem is that the deck should be over their heads. The deck should be sitting on the top of the megalithic lattice-work that screws the top oar tier to the topwhale. On the column, our sculptor chappie has omitted the deck so he can show a few oarsmen in the vessel. The trireme is Trajan's flagship and so he should have some company, working hard to propel him along. But he cant have all the rowers hidden in the ship. So he gets a few that are liberated from inside the ship and proportionately larger than the ship but matching Trajan.
The rigging is up again. And all the oars are out. Read the 'Olympias' books to learn this is a rare occurrence, especially when the sail is so full that the ship will move faster than the oars and give the rowers an interesting experience. The rig is not badly done but a galley of this size would not have a rope ladder for the tiny crew to climb and the reefing lines should be secured at the gunwhales so they do not form a barrier across the deck.
Now we get to the front of ship and something odd awaits. Dodging the health and safety problems of a barbeque on deck we see an enormous castle is erected in the bow. Plainly, the castelated prow of the ship on the column coul dbe scaled up a bit, but this much ?.
The forecastle is too high. Even assuming the men are 1,65m tall it is three men high. 5,7m is a lot to stack on a ship's bows. No wonder it's going fast with full sail and the wind catching in this structure!
But there is no wake so I need not be worried, Looking at the column the ship's forecastle could easily be interpreted as being as high as a man's waist only.
Something funny happens at the bows where the ship is flaring out but this is hard to discern.
The liburnian sailing along on the port side suffers the same problems but has few visible crew. Its upper oar tier is worked through the screen rather than under it but this is merely an adjustment of the basic error. The screen was a deck support - the oars worked over the gunwhale. The steering oars are truly massive.
Both ships have very high freeboard and massive sterns.
The freighter in the background is a classic corbita. It turns out the giant radio valve is a lantern hanging from the trireme's aphlaston so that problem is solved..whew. No more detail can be seen than in any sculpture.
That's it. The ships are disproportionate and have misinterpreted structures.
PLATE C
In plate C the Pannonian Fleet is attacked while iced-in by Iazyges.
Two
ships lie in the foregound so that their curved bows and prow ornaments form a
picturesque circle around struggling Romans and barbarians who have now
become Jazigi(sic) and Quadi.
Oar is 4.95 plus length under water and inboard.
The left is supposed to be a celox or keles
from the Alba Fucens relief. There is no evidence for celoxes after the
first century BC according to Casson. A celox was a light, fast merchant galley with
few oars.
This one is big. The gunwale is about 3.5 metres in the air. This means
the ship is as high as a Seven, surely not. The oars necessary to row this 'ship' along would have to be about 6 metres long to be useably. Longer than those of a Three.
A handy feature of this book is that it contains the evidence that proves itself wrong. A celox was a ship with a straight bow. The Alba Fucens relief on page 40 shows this.The caption of C says this. The ship in the painting does not have this - it has an outward-curving fore-foot with a bit of tin plate nailed to it. This 'ram' appears to be the forefoot reinforcement of the boat 'Alkedo'/Seagull found at Pisa illustrated on page 39. The boat on page 39 is not given a scale, why ? Because it is too titchy ? In fact, this boat is only 1.23 metres from keel to gunwale. It was 14 metres long and 3 metres wide. It was not really a ship. It was a fast riverboat. At 14 metres it could have been rowed by about ten men. It is not a warship. It would not be fitted with a ram. Wishful thinking.
The right ship is not discussed but seems to be a liburnian from the column. It is, as usual. too big.
Meanwhile, the Romans and Jazzy guys hack and slash in the background. The dead warrior in the foreground is derived from Osprey Men at Arm 129 Germanics and Dacians. He is a mix of figures C1 and C2. Is this good enough ? An Osprey book which uses Osprey books as its reference sources ? The shield design is exactly the same for fucks's sake.
I am no armour buff but didn't leather strap armour go out with early Hollywood ?
What the book has let slip is a chance to really examine and reconstruct the ships of Trajan's Column because this is the single biggest assemblage of detailed evidence. There are warships of different sizes and other military support ships. They could have been well reconstructed and illustrated. They are shown in photographs but not reconstructed here.
The other chance lost was to use the excellent photos the author has of the Pompeii and other frescoes. They are nice to see in clear colourful photographs but quite a chance is lost to recreate them in colour.
The Gothic ship at lower right is ...odd. Why should a railing run up into the vertical on the stern ? Who is going to fall off sideways there ? And nice uniforms by the Gothic army.
