Athens paid for its warfleet with a lucky silver strike
In 483/2 BC Themistocles talked the Athenian assembly into spending the windfall from newly found silver mines at Laurion on 200 triremes. Within a few years those fast, three-banked galleys crushed Xerxes' fleet at Salamis and became the foundation of the first maritime empire in world history.
A trireme took its name from its three rows of oars on each side, one man per oar. It grew out of earlier galleys: the penteconter, with a single bank of 25 oars per side, and the two-banked bireme of Phoenician origin. Who built the first three-banked ship is disputed. Thucydides said the Corinthians brought it to Greece in the late 8th century BC, while Clement of Alexandria credited the Sidonians, leaving open a Phoenician birth.
The first certain use in battle comes around 525 BC, when Polycrates of Samos sent 40 of them to support a Persian attack on Egypt. The Persians were the first to field them in large numbers, and by 490 BC they formed the core of the Persian navy. Early in the 5th century the design came to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, and it stayed the leading warship from the 7th to the 4th centuries BC, until bigger quadriremes and quinqueremes displaced it.
Engineering it stretched ancient technology to its limit. Rowers sat in three files, known as thalamians at the bottom, zygians in the middle and thranites on top, each man placed outboard of and overlapping the one below. The staggered packing kept the oar ports close to the hull and the centre of gravity low, giving stability as well as the high oar gearing needed for speed.
After Salamis and a further victory at Mycale, Athens led the Delian League, which gradually hardened into an Athenian empire resting on a fleet of over 200 triremes. The ships guarded grain convoys from the Black Sea and gave steady paid work to poorer citizens, helping to sustain radical democracy. The same fleet sealed the city's fate: in the Peloponnesian War Athens lost its navy in Sicily and finally at Aegospotami, and Sparta prevailed.
Source: Trireme
