JanineTriremes and the modern athlete
November 29th 2008 08:07
An Athenian trireme (image: wikipedia commons)
The other member of this conversation was Zac, whose family is very Greek (should try his Mum's rice pudding - divine) and he commented that athletes these days are sooks compared to the Athenian oarsmen of 427 BC.
He wasn't quite this specific of course, but it twigged something in my memory of a story I read a while ago specifically about these astonishing athletes.
The story is as follows (and I have pasted this from the story as it's succinctly put):
In 427 BC, the Greek city-state of Athens crushed a revolt in Mytilene on the Aegean island of Lesbos. The Athenian assembly decided that all men in Mytilene should be killed in punishment and dispatched the order by the fastest means it knew - a trireme, the classic oared warship of the ancient Mediterranean. The next day, the assembly relented and sent a second trireme to call off the massacre. Mytilene was 340 kilometres away and the first ship had a day-and-a-half start - but by rowing non-stop for 24 hours, the crew of the second ship arrived in time to stop the slaughter.
This sounds like it could only be the stuff of legend, but there are enough accounts that it is taken to be true, and this was not the only occasion on which the oarsmen rowed fast and long. Although the exact accounts did vary, they were all consistent on the speed: a trireme crew could row at up to 7 or 8 knots (13-15 km/hour) for more than 16 hours.
Modern crews have tried to replicate these speeds in the Olympias, a reconstructed trireme. The most recent of these crews were highly trained and very fit but the best they could manage was 9 knots - ramming speed - but only for a few seconds. Over long distances they managed a top speed of 5 knots, which is slower than an average Athenian crew. There's a great blog post from one of the guys involved in a 1987 trial.
Now, to be fair to the modern-day crews, it's worth noting that the design of the trireme was a best guess given historical information (no wreck of one has ever been found) and they found that the boat was too short and the oar system wasn't as effective as it could be. This means that not all of the energy being put into the boat was efficiently propelling it forward.
However, the fact remains that metabolic testing showed that a sustained seven knots was more than modern athletes were capable of delivering. This would suggest that the intrinsic aerobic capability of Athenian oarsmen was greater than that we can deliver now.
Apparently there were around 34,000 of these oarsmen in the 4th century - and that no matter the explanation the modern crews "were left feeling distinctly inferior".
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