It is doubtful how far the Alexandrine poets can be relied upon as giving accurate information respecting details of ancient use. Yet we have many lifelike pictures and a great profusion of details, drawn no doubt from the ample stores of antiquarian knowledge which these laborious men of letters had at their service in the great Alexandrine library, and these go to fill up that which is lacking in the Homeric picture. And so when Apollonius the Rhodian paints for us such scenes as those of the building of the Argo, the launching, the detail of the crew, and the starting of the vessel, we cannot help feeling that they are described _con amore_, not of the sea, or of ships, or of rowing, but of the literary beauty of similar descriptions by earlier poets. In a word, they are at second hand. But better this than none at all.
[Illustration: ANCIENT BOAT DEPICTED ON VASE.]
The 'bireme,' or two-banked vessel, does not appear in Homer. But, as we have seen, it was probably in existence before Homer's time. If of Egyptian parentage, it was adapted for use on the Mediterranean waters by the shipwrights of Sidon or Tyre. It is a curious reflection that this remarkable evolution of banked vessels should, so far as we can judge, have occupied about two thousand years; the curve, if we may use the expression, of development rising to the highest point in the useless Tesseraconteres of Ptolemy, and after Actium declining to the dromons and biremes of the Byzantine Emperor Leo, and finally subsiding into the monocrota or one-banked vessels, the galleys of mediæval times.
The problem which taxed the ingenuity of those early shipwrights was briefly this, how to get greater means of propulsion by increasing the number of oars, without such increase in the length of the ship as would, by increased weight, neutralise the advantage and still further diminish that facility in turning which was of the greatest moment to the ancient war-vessel. Galleys with fifty oars on either side had already been constructed,[2] and all the speed that a hundred pairs of hands could give had been obtained, when the invention of the bireme exhibited the means of nearly doubling the power without much increasing the weight to be moved, since but little additional height or breadth was required.