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Spread of the Navel Technology
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She
was the plaything of kings, admirals, and empires, saved a life and
allowed a horrible war. She was stolen, cast aside, captured, prized,
marveled at, and commemorated in the Roman forum. For nearly two
decades, she was the undisputed queen of the Western Mediterranean, and
finally a captive of war. We do not know how she met her final fate,
and we do not even know her name. But she is not forgotten, and she has
much to teach us..
A
new combination of primary sources allows a new understanding of how
technological innovation spread in the Hellenistic World. The accounts
of Plutarch, Diodorus, and Polybius all include references to a large
war vessel that played a pivotal role in the history of the 3rd.
Century B.C. In succession, the authors describe how knowledge of the
most advanced achievements in large ship construction passed from
Macedonia, to Epirus, to Carthage, to Rome in a period of thirty years.
These references allow us to observe a repeated transfer of technology
during one of Antiquity's few eras of technological innovation.
Demetrius
Poliorcetes spent his life trying to be the next Alexander, but a
Darius was lacking among the rest of Alexander's would-be successors.
What distinguished Demetrius was his use of innovative technology to
achieve his victories. His exploits with his new weapons had made this
Macedonian monarch the terror of the Greek East. Plutarch makes it
clear that Demetrius's new weapons became subjects of intense interest
and emulation on the part of his rivals and potential targets. More
than just the kings were affected. The shores were crowded with
onlookers when his new vessels sailed past. Whether the Greeks were
wondering wondering or trembling at the capabilities of the new
monsters is open for debate. Plutarch's qamazon allows such speculation
(Plu. Dem. 220.3- 5).
At
the very start of his career, Demetrius's investment in maritime
innovation paid him a handsome return. The size and the strength of his
new breed of warships allowed him to defeat the fleet of Ptolemy I off
Cyprian Salamis in 306. So heavily-built were Demetrius's vessels that
they could mount catapults capable of firing both bolts and stones at
the Egyptian vessels. The devastating bombardment was quite possibly
the first use of shipborne artillery at sea. Demetrius prevailed in a
battle reflecting a clear departure from the older tradition of
warships fighting by maneuver and speed. A wall of heavy vessels
battered the Egyptians with missiles and crushed them into the
shore(Diod. 20.49.4). And Demetrius would build vessels larger than
those at Salamis.
Demetrius's
faith in large warships again justified itself after his and his father
Antigonus's shattering defeat at Ipsos in 305. With all the other
Successors united against him, Demetrius nontheless had a place to go.
Due to his vessels' size and seakeeping qualities, he was able to
retreat, in effect, into the Mediterranean itself. With his monsters
Demetrius menaced every coast. In the end, he was invited back into the
Successors' game when Seluecus Nicator offered alliance. Again the size
of Demetrius's ships availed him. Demetrius entertained Seleucus and
his court comfortably at a royal banquet on board his massive
'thirteen' (Plu. Dem. 30.1-32.2) while negotiations proceded with that
continental ruler. After a rather amazing set of events tossed him onto
the throne of Macedonia, Demetrius soon began to build again. At least
500 of the largest and most advanced ships ever constructed were
outfitting or germinating in Demetrius's shipyards by the year 288. By
then, however, his weary subjects had finally decided, after fifty
years of trying, that they had enough of world conquest (Plu. Dem. 43).
Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, and Lysimachus of Thrace were welcomed by the
Macedonian people when they invaded Macedonia from the east and west.
Demetrius fled as his subjects deserted him, and soon afterwards
Pyrrhus and Lysimachus divided Demetrius's kingdom and possessions
between them.(Plu. Pyr. 12.7)
That
Demetrius's collection of dreadnoughts were a major objective of the
conquerors is not to be doubted. Lysimachus's hatred of Demetrius was
legendary. He had previously had help in restraining his antipathy.
Demetrius had treated him to a demonstration of his fleet and siege
train while besieging Cilician Soli. (Plu. Dem 20.4). One manifestation
of Lysimachus's admiration was his own behemoth, the Leontophoros, a
subject of scholarly inquiry even to the present day.(Memnon 13 =
Jacoby, FGH no. 434, 8.5, vol. III B, p. 344). Another was
appropriation of the originals that inspired the counter. That
Demetrius's ships were employed by the conquerors is well known.
Ptolemy Keraunos was the ultimate inheritor of Lysimachus's fleet. The
Leontophoros and Demetrus's warships defeated Demetrius's son Gonatas,
in 280 (Memnon 14; Just. 24.1.8).
It
is not, then, difficult to determine where Pyrrhus had obtained the
pride of his fleet; the subject of this treatment. With her and his
elephants he planned to cow and then unite the Greeks of Italy and
Sicily behind him for use against his rivals in the East. She would
fail him in that purpose, but this unnamed monster warship saved his
life at the very start of his invasion of Italy in the very year of
Gonatas's defeat. The Ancients never noted Epirus and the Illyriote
coast for the construction of any but pirate vessels. This ship was
something entirely different, a fact made clear by the terrible storm
that bore down on the Epirote fleet in the Ionian. The tempest sank or
scattered all of Pyrrhus's ships but one. The flagship held her course
and her own in the pounding seas, taking the seas broadside and ramming
her massive prow into the Italian shore. Plutarch is quite positive
that it was only the strength and size of the royal galley (basiliks)
that allowed the king to reach the land. Pyrrhus and his crew survived
to give the Romans and the heirs of Alexander their first and costly
lessons in each side's military prowess.(Plu. Pyr. 15.2-3) It is seldom
that a single vessel can play so decisive a role in world history, but
with Pyrrhus would have drowned his dream of conquest in Italy, and it
took a great deal more besides to kill that.
After
his celebrated 'victories' against the Roman army prompted him to seek
conquest elsewhere, Pyrrhus's huge flagship bore him next to Sicily. We
may have an occluded reference from a local source to her size.
Diodorus 'the Sicilian' refers to a 'Royal Nine' among Pyrrhus's
vessels at Syracuse, although his language could imply that the ship
was Syracusan (Diod. 22.8.5). Once again, the ship's size seems to have
had a role in influencing the course of events. She and her other
sisters inadvertently contributed to Pyrrhus's spectacular failure to
unite the Greeks of Sicily under his banner. The large ships required
large crews, and it was Pyrrhus's demands for men to man his fleet for
a planned descent upon Carthage that finally alienated the Sicelote
Greeks from their would-be liberator. (Plu. Pyr. 23.3) With no ability
to take his war to Africa, Pyrrhus's hopes for subduing Carthage in
Sicily and North Africa collapsed in ruin.(Diod. 22.8.5) Worse yet, the
Carthaginians were swift to retake ground lost, and the huge ship still
lacked men when the avenging Carthaginian armada fell upon Pyrrhus and
his fleet as he made his retreat from Sicily in 274. The Carthaginians
ended up with many of Pyrrhus's vessels.(Plu. Pyr. 24.1)
Polybius
provides the last chapter of the flagship's story. So impressed were
the Carthaginians with the monster's construction that 'the ship of
King Pyrrhus,' as Polybius calls her, became the pride of their navy.
She was the command ship sent against Duilius's Roman squadron at Mylae
in 260, under the command of yet another Carthaginian Hannibal.
Disaster followed when the Romans deployed their own celebrated bit of
maritime technological innovation. Most of the fleet and the admiral's
vessel was there taken by the victorious Romans. (Plb. 1.23.1-7) Even
then, for a final time her size may have availed her commander. As the
corvus struck home, Hannibal managed to make his escape in the ship's
tender (skf) (Polyb. 1.23.7) It may have been the vessel's age alone
that proved her undoing, for another Carthaginian flagship proved too
big, too well-crewed, and too fast for the Roman squadron that took her
nine consorts off Tyndaris in 257. (Plb. 1.25.3)
Honesty
compels me to note that the ship may have been re-rigged, or, less
possibly, she may have been a sister vessel from Demetrius's yards, for
Polybius and the Latin inscription refer to her as an
ptrhs/septeres/seven. Duilius's pride in his prize has an enduring
mounment. An Augustan reconstruction of the his columna rostrata still
commemorates the victory and 'he who took the seven.'.(CIL 12.25,
6.1300, line 11) 'When in doubt, emend, is NOT my motto, or sound
practice, but nnrhs for ptrhs isn't much of a stretch. I will save
someone the trouble of saying that the Latin is unambiguous.
The
final fate of the aging vessel in Roman hands is uncertain-but one
thing is. By 257 the Roman navy was using vessels of greater size than
it had ever previously constructed.(Plu. 1.26.10) A monopoloy of the
largest ships was yet another thing that could not be left to the
Carthaginians.
What
happened each time the vessel changed hands need not be argued. Our
records of such early American warships as the U.S.S. President and the
Chesapeake are filled out by measurements taken by their British
captors, who routinely 'took off' the lines of captured enemy ships in
the event their construction offered useful innovation to the Royal
Navy. There were no journals of maritime architecture in those days,
but an experienced shipwright could learn a great deal from the simple
inspection of a new kind of vessel. Polybius, of course, offers in the
very narrative of Mylae his account of a Punic wreck providing the
pattern for Roman construction (Polyb. 1.20.15). The details are
probably apocryphal, but at the least, the account suffices to
demonstrate that the concept of emulation in maritime architecture
antedates considerably the War of 1812.(Polyb. 1.20.15) And it was at
such a time, as Duilius gloried in his prize, that the Italian or
Italiote shipwrights got their chance to examine a product of their
Eastern counterparts, the men Demetrius had employed to build his
creations.
The
sources for the facts themselves exist to show an explosion of maritime
technology at the time Pyrrhus's great ship so profoundly affected the
affairs of Italy. As noted, at the start of his career, Demetrius had
defeated the Ptoemaic fleet at Cyprian Salamis and by the reign of
Ptolemy II, the Egyptian fleet would contain the most terrifying
agglomeration of monster galleys ever seen in the Mediterranean (Athen.
5.203d). Outright defeat was a strong impetus to innovate, or match, at
least. By the end of the great siege of 305, the Rhodians had a more
intimate acquaintance with Demetrius's advancements in engineering of
all varieties than either side might have wished . Several of
Demetrius's vessels were among the Rhodians' legacies when the Besieger
finally received his father's instructions to quit.
Pyrrhus and Lysimachus divided up Demetrius's fleet in 288 and
Antigonus received at least some of his inheritance before his dynasty
prevailed in Macedonia. Pyrrhus delivered at least one large warship
into the emulous hands of the Carthaginians and Romans, both of whom
began to build large vessels. Hiero of Syracuse had been the nervous
spectator of the first Punic War. That dynast commissioned Archimedes
to build a huge ship with weapons enough to be proof against any
conceivable attacker(Athen. 5.206d-209b). This 3rd century B.C. Great
Eastern proved too big for Hiero's harbors, but when Hiero loaded the
Syracusia with fish sauce and presented her to the Ptolemies, the
technology had changed directions. For this last of the behemoths was
built as a grain carrier.
And
so, we have the eventful biography' of the levaithan Pyrrhus looted
from Demetrius's shipyards, and her geneology. There is also, however,
a significance to her story that transcends even her roles in the
Romans' war with Pyrrhus; the struggle between Greeks and Carthaginians
in Sicily; and even the First Punic War. She was not the only large
vessel capable of surviving in rough seas and delivering an important
freight. Rhodes' deep harbors had hindered that island's earlier
development as a trading port, but deep harbors were exactly what
monsters such as the Syracusia, renamed Alexandris, required to hold
themselves and their vast cargoes. Rhodian freighters transported
Egyptian and Black Sea grain from Cilicia to Massilia, efficiently
enough to ensure legendary profits and a reputation for dependability.
The
changes did not stop at the water's edge. Populations in urban centers
could now hold more people than local agriculture could ever
conceivably support, and Rome began the final phase of its urban
development. Rome, and later Constantinople, would come to depend on
the overseas shipment of large amounts of grain from the wheat fields
of the Black Sea and the Nile. Politicians and voters began to
appreciate the possibilities of large scale routine grain shipments and
the need for their routine and safe arrival. Claudius and Trajan
converted Ostia into a fit haven for the large grain ships to make sure
the panem arrived and the population stayed fed at the circenses. One
such monster freighter was, in fact, converted into an island for the
new harbor's lighthouse with a final cargo of hydraulic concrete. From
the 2nd Century A.D. survives Lucian's amazed description of the Isis,
a vessel the size of the U.S.S. Constitution. After his inspection of
the ship, blown off course to Athens, Lucian provided a litany of her
size, design and refinements, as wells as her ability to survive
adverse seas (Luc. Nav. 4-14). Such was the legacy of the Hellenistic
age. Demetrius's catapults, rams, and even his famous siege tower were
only of pressing interest at specific sieges at specific times. Large
capacity marine transport, however, played an important role in the
later history of the Mediterranean. As far back as King Pyrrhus's
doomed effort to conquer Italy, that single large warship demonstrated
to all in contact with her-and they were many-the size and seakeeping
potential of the latest stage of maritime architecture. |
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