Salaminia

Salaminia was the Air Force One of the ancient world.

Salaminia was a trireme in the Athenian Navy, easily the most powerful fleet in the world throughout the golden age of Greece. There were about 300 ships in the fleet at its peek, but Salaminia and her sister ship Paralos were special. They were fitted with only the best equipment, crewed only by Athenian citizens who volunteered for the job, and used for delicate diplomatic missions, when getting the ambassador where he needed to go quickly was of the greatest importance.

Each year too, Salaminia and Paralos carried gifts to the Sanctuary of Apollo on the isle of Delos, one of the holiest places in all Hellas. Any sacred duties requiring a ship, Salaminia and Paralos got the job.

Triremes carried almost as many crew as a modern destroyer - about two thirds the modern complement - though with quite different job allocations since not many modern warships need to be rowed.

Triremes were rigged with square sails, but you only read of the sails being used to boost the efforts of the rowers, and sails were never used in battle, when manouverability was all. I'll do a post on naval tactics some other time; how they fought the ships is fascinating.

The trireme needed about 170 men to row it, sitting in (surprise!) three rows. The top row of oarsmen, called the thranites, could get air and light. The zygios sat cramped on benches below the heads of the men above them, and squashed at the bottom, the thalamios had to pull oars jammed against the hull and with two layers of stinking men above them. Even in ancient times there were jokes about the men at the bottom being farted on, or worse.

Contrary to the picture most people have, they were free men on every trireme, meaning hired hands and mercenaries as well as citizens, but never slaves. More than that, on Salaminia and Paralos they were exclusively citizens of Athens, since those two had sacred religious duties. The rowers were presumably poor – surely the only reason a man would volunteer for this duty – but they had every right a citizen had.

Slaves were not used for a very good reason. Think about what would happen if slaves were in a position to take control of the most powerful fleet in the world.

In addition to the 170 engines, there was a singer and an aulos player to keep the time. There was not a drummer, again contrary to popular image. The aulos was a wind instrument like a recorder but with two pipes in a V.

The captain was called the Trierarch, and he was useless. The Trierarch was generally the wealthy Athenian who'd paid for the ship to be built and maintained. With a total lack of taxation, the way things got paid for was sort of interesting, but I'll save that for another post. The short description is, the guy who donated the ship to the state got to call himself captain.

The man who was really in charge was the helmsman. There was also a foredeck officer called the proreus in charge of looking where they were going, because the helmsman at the back of a 40m (130ft) ship couldn't necessarily see anything close. A rowing chief on each side kept the rowers in check and, I suspect, headed off fights.

The Greeks thought of their ships as female, like we do. Salaminia means the Girl From Salamis. I've always assumed the ship was named in honor of Athen's greatest victory at sea, over the Persians in the straits of Salamis, but I've never seen it stated anywhere - it's merely my assumption. If someone could tell me the correct etymology I'd appreciate it.

There is one single trireme left in the world, though sadly no longer sailing the seas. Olympias is a fully commissioned ship in the modern Greek Navy. The pictures in this post are all of her, downloaded from the Greek Navy's website.

The Classical Athenian Calendar

Since we're starting a new year, this would be a good time to talk about the classical Greek calendar, or rather, the classical Athenian calendar, because every city ran its own version and the only one we really know anything about is the Athenian.

Mental health warning: this is long, complex, and confusing! Do not proceed if you value your sanity.

Let's start with year numbering.

There wasn't any. In Athens each year was named in honor of the city Mayor-cum-CEO who held office that year, called the Eponymous Archon, meaning archon who names [the year]. Eponymous is a word in English to this day, btw, and its meaning hasn't changed much in 2,500 years. So my first book, The Pericles Commission, opens in the Year of Conon, which we call 461BC.

Named years have caused historians to put a lot of effort into working out the correct and complete archon list. Without it, you can't work out what happened when. It's all very well for X to happen in the Year of Fred and Y to happen in the year of Jane, but which came first?

It gets worse, because every city named their years after their own officials, and no one ever kept a list of corresponding years between cities. The cities also kept different months, as we're about to see, and began their years on different days.

So unless two events happened within shouting distance of each other, no one could ever know which happened first. This is reflected in the words of Thucydides, Herodotus et al., who frequently use terms like, "X happened at about the same time as Y." They're not being deliberately vague; they genuinely have no idea which happened first or how much time separated. They can easily be out by many months. In fact, to compare two distant events, the smallest safe unit of resolution is probably the season.

Greek months are lunar. Every Greek month starts with the sighting of the next new moon. In fact, they called the first day of each month noumenia which means (surprise!) new moon. Every noumenia was considered a particularly holy day. Officials went out of their way to never schedule anything for a noumenia. So if you ever catch my characters attending an official function on a noumenia you can validly beat me up. I did, in fact, in my short story The Pasion Contract have a contract killing arranged for noumenia, but I figure that's acceptable since hired thugs probably aren't all that pious.

There are 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 3 seconds in an astronomical lunar month. So Greek months were either 29 or 30 days long. Since the new month was defined as starting on the sight of the new moon, there was never much doubt when a new month began.

The definition of "day" was a bit odd. For the Greeks, the old day ended and the new one began at dusk. This makes perfect sense for people working to a lunar calendar. Their day begins with the moon telling them what day of the month it is. But it creates a terminology problem for me. Nicolaos could say at midday, "I'll meet you early tomorrow," and mean that night, leaving you the reader totally confused. I solved this problem by completely ignoring it and sticking to modern convention.

The Athenian months in order were:

Hekatombion
Metageitnion
Boedromion
Pyanepsion
Maimakterion
Poseidon
Gamelion
Anthesterion
Elaphebolion
Munychion
Thargelion
Skirophorion

No, I can never remember them either (and can barely pronounce them!) but the exotic names are great for atmosphere. I can say things like, "He died on the noumenia of Hekatombion," as if it made sense.

Every city had a different set of names for their months. Just to make it more fun, they started their years at different times too. All the Hellene cities fell (broadly) into two very ancient tribal lineages: the Dorians and the Ionians. I have a feeling, which I've never been able to confirm, that it was mostly Dorian cities which started their year at winter solstice, and mostly Ionian starting at summer. But don't quote me on that. The Athenians, as good Ionians, began theirs on the first new moon after the summer solstice, putting them as out of synch with the modern calendar as you can get.

The lunar month does not divide evenly into 365.2423 days. (Nor does any other sensible number, for that matter. When God created the universe, he really screwed up on this point big time.)

The Greeks tried to fit a lunar calendar into a solar year, so that the months had a fighting chance of being consistent with the seasons. Such calendars are called lunisolar.

Twelve lunar months fall short of a solar year by about 11 days. The Athenians handled this by inventing an extra month every two years. And not just inventing, but duplicating the previous month. It is said, but I've never seen the proof, that the month they usually duplicated was Poseidon, so every second year there'd be Poseidon I followed by Poseidon II. Or not, if they decided to duplicate a different month instead. The guy who got to decide was the Eponymous Archon.

This still didn't fix the problem completely since twice 11 does not equal 29. Not to worry...the archons invented extra days at random to pad things out. This was a useful trick for buying extra rehearsal time before important festivals if people weren't ready. I'm not kidding...this actually happened! Once, the calendar was frozen for 4 days before a Great Dionysia.

Since the noumenia of Hekatombion is the first new moon after the summer solstice, it acts like a reboot for the calendar. No matter how screwed up the calendar had become, there was always a clean reboot in the future.

They couldn't even manage to number the days in a month consecutively. Every month was broken into three sections: moon waxing, full, and waning. After noumenia, the next day was called 2nd Waxing, then 3rd Waxing, and so on to 10th Waxing. Then the system changes to 11th, 12th, 13th...19th, and then earlier 10th! 10 doesn't normally come after 19, but that's how it worked! The earlier is very important because the following day was later 10th. Yes, they had two 10ths in a row: earlier and later. After later 10th it counted down: 9th Waning, 8th Waning, ..., 2nd Waning, and ending with hena kai nea, meaning old and new. On a 29 day month 2nd Waning was dropped.

If you're getting the impression the Greek calendar was insanely chaotic, you're right. A modern astronomer confronted with the Greek calendar would probably be driven to self-harm, or more sensibly, Greco-harm.

The only thing common across every calendar in every city was...the Olympics. They happened every 4 years at a more or less consistent time, fixed by the leaders of the city of Elis, who were always the hosts. That's why some ancient authors might refer to an event as happening in the year of the 74th Olympiad, or whatever. It's their attempt to make dating sensible across all of Hellas, but that's the closest they ever got to unity.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all the strange people who read this blog! Your presence is very much appreciated, and so are your often brilliant comments.

The ancient Greeks didn't celebrate New Year, and even if they did, their year started halfway through our calendar year. So I've nothing to add except to wish you everything you desire for 2009, and offer you this Reuters image of New Year celebrations at the Parthenon.

Which reminds me, I should write something about calendars some time...

Happy Saturnalia!

I've wished a few people a happy Saturnalia recently, and discovered some don't know what it is. So here is a quick run down on the real celebration for this time of year.

Saturnalia was the Roman festival in honor of...you guessed it...Saturn, the god of the harvest. The festival sits more or less on top of the winter solstice, if you happen to be in the northern hemisphere, when winter turns and crops soon begin to grow once more.

During Saturnalia friends would give each other presents. There was much merry-making, partying, eating and drinking. Sound familiar?

It was the time of Misrule. Slaves were allowed to dress and behave as freed men, even permitted to drink and gamble. They could lounge around the house and give orders to their owners. The slave owners served a banguet to their slaves. You can imagine how much the slaves would have enjoyed that.

Common sense dictates the slaves did not make too much of their one week of lordship, because if they did, their masters would have the next 51 weeks to exact revenge. Chances are it was, fundamentally, an official holiday for all slaves. Not that the owners would have noticed; they would have been too wiped by their own celebrations.

Saturnalia began on December 17th and went for a week. It was only a couple of days originally, but the festival just kept getting longer and longer because everyone loved it so much. It reached the point where two Roman Emporers even tried to reduce the holiday, but everyone ignored the boring old guys and kept partying.

Saturnalia did not include Christmas trees, by the way. Christmas trees originated in pagan Germany, associated with the winter solstice festival Yule, and seem to have spread into the English speaking world via marriage between the English royal family and German nobility in the late 1700s. Subsequently during the Peninsular War, Wellington's forces included the King's Own German Legion, German cavalry fighting for England, who probably spread the custom to the commoners.

The Greeks, weirdly, had no equivalent celebration I know of for the winter solstice. The closest were the Lenaea, which was held at the beginning of winter and included a major arts festival, and the Kronia, which was held on the 12th Hekatombaion, which was in Spring or Summer. Despite the radically different date, the Kronia was the exact equivalent of Saturnalia. It included master/slave role reversal and was in honor of Kronus, the Greek harvest god.

Experts (which means not me!) seem to believe Jesus was actually rather unlikely to have been born at Christmas, plumping mostly for some time in Spring. As Christianity became the dominant religion, people remained unwilling to give up the immensely popular Saturnalia, so the date was adopted for Christmas.

So as you celebrate Christmas this year, spare a thought for the poor god Saturn, who's mostly out in the cold these days.

Io Saturnalia!