Verslag van de reconstructie van een Griekse galei.

Second edition of the technical and historical background to the reconstruction of a Greek warship.

Formidable and sophisticated, triremes were the deadliest battleship of the ancient world, and at the height of their success, the Athenians were the dominant exponents of their devastating power. Primarily longships designed to fight under oar power, the trireme was built for lightness and strength; ship-timber was mostly softwoods such as poplar, pine and fir, while the oars and mast were made out of fir. Their main weapon was a bronze-plated ram situated at the prow. From the combined Greek naval victory at Salamis (480 BC), through the Peloponnesian War, and up until the terrible defeat by the Macedonians at Amorgos, the Athenian trireme was an object of dread to its enemies. This book offers a complete analysis and insight into the most potent battleship of its time; the weapon by which Athens achieved, maintained, and ultimately lost its power and prosperity.

This is the first detailed and comprehensive study of the shipsheds which were a defining symbol of naval power in the ancient Mediterranean.

Presents a history of the epic battles, the indomitable ships, and the men--from extraordinary leaders to seductive rogues--who established Athens' supremacy, taking readers on a tour of the far-flung expeditions and detailing the legacy of a forgotten maritime empire.

On a late September day in 480 B.C., Greek warships faced an invading Persian armada in the narrow Salamis Straits in the most important naval battle of the ancient world. Overwhelmingly outnumbered by the enemy, the Greeks triumphed through a combination of strategy and deception. More than two millennia after it occurred, the clash between the Greeks and Persians at Salamis remains one of the most tactically brilliant battles ever fought. The Greek victory changed the course of western history -- halting the advance of the Persian Empire and setting the stage for the Golden Age of Athens. In this dramatic new narrative account, historian and classicist Barry Strauss brings this landmark battle to life. He introduces us to the unforgettable characters whose decisions altered history: Themistocles, Athens' great leader (and admiral of its fleet), who devised the ingenious strategy that effectively destroyed the Persian navy in one day; Xerxes, the Persian king who fought bravely but who ultimately did not understand the sea; Aeschylus, the playwright who served in the battle and later wrote about it; and Artemisia, the only woman commander known from antiquity, who turned defeat into personal triumph. Filled with the sights, sounds, and scent of battle, The Battle of Salamis is a stirring work of history.

Historians since Herodotus and Thucydides have claimed that the year 483 BCE marked a turning point in the history of Athens. For it was then that Themistocles mobilized the revenues from the city's highly productive silver mines to build an enormous war fleet. This income stream is thought to have become the basis of Athenian imperial power, the driving force behind its democracy and the centre of its system of public finance. But in his groundbreaking new book, Hans van Wees argues otherwise. He shows that Themistocles did not transform Athens, but merely expanded a navy-centred system of public finance that had already existed at least a generation before the general's own time, and had important precursors at least a century earlier. The author reconstructs the scattered evidence for all aspects of public finance, in archaic Greece at large and early Athens in particular, to reveal that a complex machinery of public funding and spending was in place as early as the reforms of Solon in 594 BCE. Public finance was in fact a key factor in the rise of the early Athenian state - long before Themistocles, the empire and democracy.