CLASSICAL CORNER
“No one ever went to Hell in a black ship” – Homer
Jehovah, wearing his naval architect’s hat, gave (Genesis 6-9) Noah a very specific DIY ark-building set of instructions: build a vessel of gopher wood, smeared inside and out with pitch, with three decks and inside compartments, an entrance on the side, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, 30 cubits high with a roof finished to a cubit upwards – a cubit was measured from elbow to fingertips, hence of variable length. A fair-sized hulk. But, just how did he get all those animals in? – We won’t go into the question of disposal of bladder and bowel effluvia. Unless we reckon the Ark to have been an aquatic proto-Tardis.
After all, Noah was (Genesis 7.6) 600 years old, an ancient mariner by terrestrial standards, average for a Time-Lord. Cries out for a mini-series with resurrected William Hartnell. Meanwhile, we must make do with periodically reported sightings of the vessel on Mount Ararat – talking Turkey here, we ark-eologists [see FT44:14-15, 54:27, 74:47, 120:34-39, 139:66, 152:34-39, etc]
Demetrius ‘Poliorketes’ (337-283 BC) – his nickname means ‘Besieger of Cities’, not ‘Taker’, was the first to deploy ships with 15 or 16 banks of oars (Plutarch, Demetrius, chs43 paras4-5). Or does this means 15/16 rowers per? Debate continues – a case of either/oar?
They worked, unlike the monster (Plutarch subjoins) constructed by Ptolemy Philopator (r. 221-205 BC): 40 banks of oars, 280 cubits long, 48 cubits high to top of stern, propelled by 4,000 rowers, also carrying 400 extra sailors and 3,000 soldiers. But, gibes Plutarch, the thing was merely for show, being unable to move. Another uselessly large vessel was the flagship of PhilipV of Macedon, which after their victory the Romans insultingly allowed him to keep, confiscating his other ships (Polybius, Histories, bk18 ch44 para6) – could add a verse here to John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’.
Philopator also had built (Athenæus, Learned Men at Dinner, chs20e-206c) a pleasure boat, likened by some moderns to an oversized catamaran, luxurious enough to satisfy the most exigent Russian oligarch, with its ample dimensions, luxurious cabins and suites and purple sails – outdoing the hues in that classic ditty ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ – and fitted out for maritime orgies – one visualises navel engagements without loss of semen.
His aforementioned monster was an attempt to out-godzilla the good ship Syracusia, designed (c. 240 BC) for King Hieron II by Archimedes, taking time off from his much-disputed burning of Roman ships’ sails by gigantic refracting mirrors and shouting ‘Eureka’ – Greek for “I’ve found my rubber duckie” – in his bathtub. Athenæus (chs206d-209e) categorises the details. Cargo capacity almost 2,000 tons, space for 1,942 passengers, 200 soldiers, and a catapult. As Noah’s Ark, it was pitchcoated, reinforced with horsehair, praised by modern experts – cf. Lionel Casson’s Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (1971) as earliest example of pro-active antifouling technology. Every detail was the last word in luxury. Apart from opulent cabins, passenger amenities included a flowered, canopied deck, gymnasium, hot-water pool, and (a touch of Swan Hellenic Cruises, if not the Titanic) a library and mosaics depicting the entire Iliad. Also (again) a masterpiece of futility: it sailed only once, then drydocked, clocking up immeasurably less furlongs than our naval Queens Elizabeth & Mary.
“The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke... she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold, of tissue... ( Antony & Cleopatra, Act 2 Scene 2)
Bill the Bard’s rhapsody is almost verbatim from Plutarch ( Antony, ch26), endorsing the common view that the biographer was his prime source for the Roman plays.
Hannibal was more practical-minded, despite his Roman biographer (chs10-1) Cornelius Nepos’s moral qualms, defeating the armada of King Eumenes of Pergamum by catapulting into his flagship clay pots containing live poisonous snakes.
Around AD 150, Lucian ( The Ship) left an excited account of the giant grain carrier Isis that he’d just seen docked at Athens’s Piræus. He expatiates on its size (180ft x 45ft x 44ft), its tonnage (c. 12,000, capable of transporting an entire years’ worth of grain to Attica), its scarlet sail, gilded prow, the name Isis elaborately painted on, with a crew the size of an army – “all relying on one little man steering with a broomstick-like tiller.”
When not shagging his three sisters or designating his racehorse Consul, Caligula amused himself with his pleasure boats on Lake Nemi. Rediscovered in 1929 (burnt in 1944), with Mussolini taking a keen and doubtless envious interest, Suetonius’s biography (ch37 para2) has this awestruck description: “Ten banks of oars, jewelled sterns, multi-coloured sails, enormous bathrooms, banquet-halls, colonnades, even profuse vines and fruit-trees, that he might feast amid songs and merriment along the Campanian shore.”
In AD 59, Nero decided to bump off Agrippina the Queen Mum. Since she was long fortified against poison by a diet of antidotes, the plan was to sink her in a collapsible boat – he and mistress Poppæa got the idea from a theatrical show – there was also a Greek precedent. As described by Tacitus ( Annals, bk14 chs 4-8), the scheme was a total clap-out; cf. Alexis Dawson’s hilarious ‘Whatever Happened to Lady Agrippina?’ Classical Journal 64, 1969, 251-67. The supposedly doomed vessel failed to telescope – only Agrippina’s cabin ceiling fell in, crushing a male companion, and no one remembered she was a strong swimmer, making it through the calm (hardly ideal for staging a fake shipwreck) Bay of Naples to her villa where she was presently slaughtered by a military SWAT team.
“Every shipwreck brings out merrymakers” – Fort, Books, p636.