From strike@CSD.UWM.EDU Thu Dec 18 14:35:19 1997
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 1997 02:04:08 -0600
From: Andy Strike 
Reply-To: History of the Ancient Mediterranean
     
To: ANCIEN-L@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU
Subject: Re: Floating Palace of Ptolemy IV

> I'm trying to find the correct spelling of the floating palace created > during the reign of Ptolemy IV (Philopator). An artist I know once saw a > picture of it. He is now trying to locate any illustration of it, since he > can't recall where he saw it. He describes it as a large platform on top > of two very large trireme-like ships. The platform carried buildings and > columns. He believes it was called "tesserakontires." Does anyone > recognize what he is talking about? If so, how is it spelled, and do you > know of any books with picture of it?

The correct spelling is "tessarakontepes" [the last two e's transliterate as eta and the accute accent falls upon the penultimate eta], which is a M & F/ N adjective of two terminations which means, perhaps, "with forty rowers to each bank of four oars". It is formed from tessarakonta "forty" + eretes "rower". When the adj. is used substantively, as a noun, it means a ship of this type. Specifically, this refers to the famous dreadnought built by Ptolemy IV [Callixenus I -fragment in FGrH-, and Plutarch "Demetrius" 43]. I know of no pictures, and suspect that any pictures are only interpretations produced by modern artists. However, here is what Plutarch has to say concerning Ptolemy's dreadnought [Penguin Translation by Scott-Kilvert]:

...Ptolemy Philopator built a vessel of forty banks of oars [see note below], which was four hundred and twenty feet long and seventy-two feet high to the top of her stern. She was manned by four hundred sailors who did not row and four thousand at the oars, and apart from these she could carry on her decks nearly three thousand soldiers. But this vessel was intended only for show: she differed little from a stationary building on land, and since she was designed for exhibition rather than for use, she could only be moved with great difficulty and danger....

[Scott-Kilvert writes contra the LS definition given above, which conceives of the ship as having four rows of 100 oars on top of each other. Thus, if each vertical group of four oars is manned by forty rowers, then the total number of rowers for the vessel is 40x100 or 4000. By this calculation the vessel contains 4x100 or 400 oars and 10x400 or 4000 rowers. Hope this makes some sense, I'm not certain if I believe it. But if you think about the physics of it you will see that it is impossible to build a vessel with forty banks of oars, one on top of the other, and have all of the oars touch the water, not hit one another, and still be of a size and length that they can be rowed by human arms and legs. Furthermore, Scott-Kilvert's calculation of 40 banks of oars, assuming 10 rowers per oar, yields a vessel with 40 banks of 10 oars each, for a total of 4000 rowers. But such a vessel has more oars vertically than it does horizontally, and this seems absurd to me.]

Hope this answers some of your questions, I am sure that there are specialized texts and articles which have more to say on the techniques of Greek naval construction, but I have only Plutarch in my home library. Gomme quotes from several authors on the subject of trireme construction in the introductory chapters of his Commentary on Thucydides, but the works he cites are now very old and may have been superseded by more recent work. Vale!

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