Digging deeper to find a more definitive idea of a liberna....
One can see from different illustrations in the Vatican Virgil 3225 - fourth century - ships that answer to the description of a liberna from the previous blogpost.
These manuscripts are early medieval copies of originals that were executed in an 'antique' style. Therefore they can show ships of a time before their date of execution. In the fifth century, for example, writers could not explain what a ram was, the spur was by then used on warships, but artist still drew a ram. Detailed study has shown that the copyists were extremely diligent in their work. They even tried to use the same brush and pen strokes as the original artists.
The overall form reminds of the Trajan's Column ships.
THE RAM
Many smaller galley depictions of AD date seem to show the upturned forefoot as seen on Trajan's Column. Whether this is truly a ram has been debated. It seems to ultimately morph into the spur of a dromon. It could be that we see a lighter ram/spur forefoot which was mainly for running down smaller vessels. Instead of impaling smaller vessels they would be run over and/or capsized. Ther eis also a proembelion which argues for an intended rolling of the target.
In the later MSS3687 - fifth century - Aeneas' ships are proto-dromoi and have a spur, not a ram. They have a chain supporting them. The spur was a long structure requiring support.
The weight and speed of the attacking ship sank or over-turned the targetted ship.
Spurred dromoi over-turn baddy ships. MADRID SKYLITZES,11cen.
THE DECK
The deck is not considered by the artist when he wants to show the ship under oars. He shows the oarsmen working but they sit too high.
A mosaic from the third century Tunis is very similar.
Now the artist will show the ships manned for fighting. The troops must be on a deck and now the oarsmen are invisible. This is probably the best depiction of a liburna in combat apart from the rig being in place. The sails are not full, maybe they are being taken down.
Another folio of the same MSS shows ships drawn in another style. All the details of a liburna are present and one can see the men on deck are not oarsmen. The deck is in place and the oars are out.
What was a 'liburna' and what did it look like ? A lot of books declare that the Romans shifted to just using a ship type called a 'Liburnian' after the victory at Actium, whereafter the Mediterranean had become 'mare nostrum'. However, as one can see from the latest Osprey offering, New Vanguard 230, there is uncertainty about what exactly a Liburnian was.
Liburnian after Viereck 1975. (Also used by D'Amato in 2016, complete with corvus and bolt shooters and 112 oars ?!)
Cobel at Tynemouth
'Liburnian' is a common noun for a ship type. It does not imply all Liburnians were exactly the same. A modern equivalent would be a 'Northumbrian Cobel' or a 'Brighton Hog'. It was a type that had its origin with a recognised form from a specific area.
Liburnia is a region of Dalmatia with a myriad islands. In the ancient world it was pirate territory and the channels and islands gave cover for ambush and escape. The Liburnians were the first area of Illyricum subdued by the Romans, hence their close relationship.
The piratical tribe of Liburnians must have had a ship suited for their profession. It was a small galley. Small, because it needed to be handy and pirates tend to operate in small groups. A Three needs 200 men to get around. It would need the men from several rural settlements to man one. And where would it be hidden or maintained?
There are some candidates for what the original Liburnians may have looked like on an engraved gravestone from Novilara in Italy. It dates to the sixth century BC and purportedly shows Liburnian and Picenian ships.
There seems to be no difference between the ships shown. Archaic features on the ship combine with a waterline ram which looks wierd. In addition, the dating of the stele is circumstantial - it was a loose find about which nothing is known. A fake ? A misattribution ? Unfortunately we cannot use these ships as a model for a Liburnian.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History
CHAP. 5. (6.)—THE BALÆNA (BALEEN WHALE) AND THE ORCA
This animal attacks the balænain in its places of retirement, and
with its teeth tears its young, or else attacks the females which
have just brought forth, and, indeed, while they are still pregnant: and as they rush upon them, it pierces them just as though
they had been attacked by the beak of a Liburnian galley.
And here are the translator's notes to the same passage....
The Natural History. Pliny the Elder: John Bostock, London. Taylor and Francis. 1855
The Liburna,
or Liburnica, was usually a bireme, or two-oared galley,
with the mast in the middle, though sometimes of larger bulk. From the
description given of these by Varro, as quoted by Aulus Gellius, B.
xvii.
c. 3, they seem, as it has been remarked, somewhat similar to the light
Indian massooliah boats, which are used to cross the serf in Madras
roads.
Pliny tells us, in B. xvi. c. 17, that the material of which they were
constructed was pine timber, as free from resin as it could possibly be
obtained. The beak of these vessels was of great comparative weight, and
its sharpness is evidently alluded to in the present passage, as also in
B.
x. c. 32. The term "Liburna" was adopted from the assistance rendered
to Augustus by the Liburni at the battle of Actium.
Here we should digress to look at a truly wonderful craft.The masooliah boats were deep-hulled wooden boats of sewn construction used to ferry goods and people ashore on the ocean coast near Madras. Bostock may himself have risked life and limb to come ashore through the surf at Madras on a 'masooliah boat'. Bostock, from Liverpool, was a President of the Royal Geological Society, MD who first described Hay Fever, and still found time to translate Pliny !
Masooliah boats have a nice connection with ancient galleys. They were handcrafted by artesans and sailed by thoroughbred seamen. The prows of the boats were decorated with apotropaic eyes.
Asiatic Society of Bengal 1920
Well, we did not find a Liburnian there, but, suitably refreshed, on with Liburnians....
During the Punic Wars Polybius tells us that it was usual for lemboi to scout ahead of the fleet. Lemboi were light galleys - another generic name for a type. Appian uses the term Liburnian for the same function, describing the same campaign.
In the introduction to The Illyrian War, ( I.3) Appian writes :
The Liburni, another Illyrian tribe, were next to the
Ardiæi as a nautical people. These committed piracy in the Adriatic Sea
and islands with their light, pointed (oksea) fast-sailing pinnaces, from which
circumstance the Romans to this day call their own light, swift biremes
(dikrota) liburnidas.
Bireme with 100 oars ! And tower .... Old Italian reconsruction copied in Osprey New Vanguard 225 : Not a Liburnian
Plutarch, Cato the Younger 54.3 -Liburnians are grouped with other fighting ships as cataphract.
' Here, indeed, and most clearly, Pompey was thought to have made
his opinion of Cato manifest. For he determined to put the command of
his fleet into the hands of Cato, and there were no less than five
hundred fighting ships, besides Liburnian craft (kataphrakta) look-out ships, and
open boats (pentekonters) in great numbers (aphrakta).'
Actium : 19th Cen view : Liburnians ?
From Imperial fleet lists we know that Trajan's Moesian flotilla had a Three as its flagship. Thus implying the liburnians which formed the rest of the unit were lesser in size.
Trajan's column has somewhat compromised depictions of what are probably Liburnians.
Men are too big, ship should be decked, upper oars worked from ports below the lattice.
The majority of ships in the surviving ship identifications we have for the Ravenna and Misenum bases are not liburnians. For example..from 1st century BC to 4th Century AD. Accumulated inscriptions....
At Misenum : 54 Threes, 15 Liburnians ; et al
At Ravenna : 22 Threes , 4 Liburnians , et al
Unknown station : 18 Threes, 7 Liburnians
Liburnian or lembus ? from Sousse, Tunis 250AD
From a later date, the 10th century we have 'The Stronghold' or Suda which is a massive Latin dictionary. This was compiled using all available literature at the time, including material from BC we no longer have access to.
Entries for 'Liburnian'....
L496 Ships [which] did not have the form of a trireme but were instead rather
piratical: brazen-beaked and strong and armoured, and unreliable in
respect of speed.
L490 "[He] having built thirty-oared runners after the model of Liburnians".
British Museum : A Liburnian ? : 2 tiers of oars, fine lines, sharp beak and cataphract
The balance of this pot pourri seems to be that a Liburnian was a galley with up to 50 oars. It was light but it was capable of fighting. so it was decked and the sides could be closed to protect the oarsmen. It had a ram and its bow was very pointed in shape. It is interesting to note that these characteristics equate with the Three's predecessor - the dikrotic pentekonter / 'bireme'. This was a crucial niche, apparently, in the ecosystem of ancient galley warfare. An agile smaller warship with a reduced crew, easy to maintain and suitable for a range of roles.
John Coates reconstructed a Liburnian in 1994 as below.
18 x 3m at waterline. 50 oars. Decked - 2m above water, 5 to 30 fighters.
( If a ship has a two-level oar system and 50 oars we can calculate it must be a minimum of (25/2) X (1.38) metres long. Here the solution is 17.27m. This is a basic calculation for galleys. Any extra length will slow the ship. )
There is a tendency in some books to elevate the Liburnian to a wannabee Three. e.g. John Warry's nice book Warefare in the Classical World.
Liburnian from John Warry's book as copied in Osprey NV225 : It is the wrong size - has a strange oar arrangement, is not fully decked, cannot be a Liburnian nor is it a dikrotic pentekonter. But it is from 1980!
This is not necessary. Rome still had Threes in its fleets all through the Imperial period as well as the manpower-efficient, handy Liburnian. A Liburnian could catch and fight any 'native' or piratical craft likely to be encountered in Roman waters.
Mmmmmmaybe not...
There does not have to be a single pattern for a Liburnian, just as there was no single pattern for a Three. But any candidate has to fit with the characteristics we found above:
Maximum 50 oars
Dikrotic - two oar tiers
Length circa 18m
Width - two men 3metres or so
Height to deck - with 2 oar tiers - circa 2m
Sharp-pointed bows and a ram
Decked - this means a continuous deck over the oarsmen. Could have a light railing.
Cataphract - along with a deck, the latticed deck-supports could be closed with canvas, leather or shuttering to protect the oarsmen from missiles in battle
After Roman practice there could be a shelter in the poop.
The focsle could be built up to deck height or open.
Such a small ship could not mount a tower.
Within these limits we could have a Liburnian with 30 oars, a Liburnian which was not decked-over to be used as a courier, a Liburnian with a single row of oars - but this would have to have 30 or less oars to keep the length down and more than 24 or it would have not enough power to do anything, it would still probably not be worth putting a ram on such a weak ship.
If the Mainz ships HERE could mount bolt shooters then so could a Liburnian.
Meanwhile, over at Greekshipmodels.com there are some nice reconstructions of Liburnian type ships.
Further to my ramblings about odd Etruscan ships (and HERE) I have located another analogue of the 'galley versus freighter' scene from the' Aristothonos Vase' depicted by on Periklis Deligiannis' blog HERE.
This time it is a smaller version. On a little jug (oenochoe) by a painter known for using a palm tree motif - 'The Palm Tree Painter'. He worked in Etruria in 700-675BC.
Palm Tree Painter's oenochoe with ships: 700-675BC
The juxtaposition of a slim galley with a more massive freighter is here. Neither ship has crew nor oars. The limited space compared with the large area on the Aristothnos vase could explain this.
The 'freighter' has a wierd massive prow which is not identical to that of the Aristothonos ship but is is strongly reminiscent. The painter meant to show something here but was maybe uncertain what exactly it was (a common feature of Italians depicting ships ?!).
In connection with trying to work out exactly what the uncertainty was, I found a comment in a paper about early Etruscan ships by Marco Bonino (SARDINIAN, VILLANOVIAN AND ETRUSCAN CRAFTS BETWEEN THE X AND THE Vlll CENTURIES BC FROM BRONZE AND CLAY MODELS in TropisIII, 1995) that supports my first impression that it is not a ram as such but a depiction of a cutwater - a building-out of the prow to make the ship sail better in waves.
Aristothonos prow and analogues from Bonino's paper.
Again, we have a case where the artist is not giving us a replica but an interpretation of a real ship. There are many small potttery ships, for example, from early historical times but to try and build ships from them would be a crazy idea.
Cutwater/forefoot : cutting water
A longship's cutwater or 'forefoot' will be a downward pointing curve because the ship's bow is lower on a lighter. slimmer ship designed to be powered by oars.
USS Constitution : A round hull like an ancient freighter with high cut-water
Whereas a round ship or freighter will be equipped with one that follows the bow up to split the waves. Building a downward curve would involve a complete rebuilding of the bow which, on a deep-hulled sailing ship for carrying a large load of cargo will be high and broad.
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.
In the later MSS3687 - fifth century - Aeneas' ships are proto-dromoi and have a spur, not a ram. They have a chain supporting them. The spur was a long structure requiring support. 
The weight and speed of the attacking ship sank or over-turned the targetted ship.
Another folio of the same MSS shows ships drawn in another style. All the details of a liburna are present and one can see the men on deck are not oarsmen. The deck is in place and the oars are out.
