HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

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to be so interpreted, but as a rower also; in the same maimer as the wordnavigium, signifying the act of working a vessel, is frequently taken for thevessel itself. This observation is made very apparent by Cicero, in his speechagainst Verres, where he affirms, that the Syracusans threw a number of piratesinto the sea, out of the vessel in which they were taken, and which according tohim was, “ Factum sex remorum numero meaning literally having six oars.This certainly cannot in common reason be otherwise interpreted than ashaving six persons to manage each ; for inasmuch as it must be concluded, thatthose gallies called Myaparones, and all other vessels built for piratical pur-poses, were very low in the water, and like the gallies of the present day;they certainly could not have had six tiers rising above each other, becausetheir form would have been inconvenient, and a vessel of so much expence andmagnitude must be considered as extremely ill adapted to its employment andoccupation. If, on the other hand, it should be imagined this vessel had only sixoars, this solution is, if possible, still more absurd than the other; first, onaccount of its contemptible size and force, secondly, because pursuing a parityof reasoning, a Trireme, or a Quadrireme, would signify a vessel having threeor four oars only.

This misinterpretation of terms has been among the first causes of that doubt,that diversity of opinions relative to the ancient marine, and that want of decisiveinformation which has attended every attempt towards regular investigation :for instance, Livy, in his thirty-third book, makes mention of a ship belongingto king Philip, which “ sedecem versus remorum agebant in plain English,was impelled by sixteen banks of oars. It having been shewn, that in thenature of things, sixteen banks, or tiers of oars, in a perpendicular, oreven an oblique direction, could not possibly exist; it thence becomes verymanifest, that the word remus is used to express the person, instead of thething, and therefore the foregoing information ought to be taken as though ithad been said, that sixteen persons were employed in each tier of oars, eitherreckoned direct, (that is to say, perpendicularly) or obliquely. The calculationwill be found to accord exactly with the system first started, allotting oneperson to each oar in the lower tier, three in the second, five in the third, andseven in the uppermost; but this suggestion, it must be candidly confessed, ismere supposition.

The assertion also of Florus, that the gallies composing Marc Anthony’s fleet,at the battle of Actium, were from Hexeremes, upwards, to Nonoremes,

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