On 13 Mar, 14:01, (Andrew Robert Breen) wrote:
In article .com,

toad wrote:
On 13 Mar, 02:36, wrote:

That galley rowing
all the time's a killer. Wikopedia says the Romans introduced it,

I've just read a biography of Boudica. That concurs that the Romans
were the first to come up with Galleys with multiple tiers of oars
giving a serious alternative power source. Designed for the first

Not even nearly. Try the Greeks in the ~700-800 BCE era for two-tier
galleys (/probably/ the Ionian city-states). Triremes (three tiers) were
introduced (by Samos?) somewhere around or before 600 BCE and were the
most common "capital ships" until the Hellenistic period, after the
break-up of Alexander the Great's empire - the successor states then
began putting more than one man on an oar, leading eventually to galleys
with 20 men diposed on three vertically-tiered oars (Ptolemy IV went as
far as a catamaran galley with two "twentys" fastened together. A big, big
ship with plenty of oar power. Probably a brute to handle under sail,
though.

Probably my memory at fault.

The big galleys vanished from sight after Actium, and by the time of the
Roman invasion of Britain (Claudius, not Caesar's raiding expeditions)
they were long gone -

I'm pretty sure that's not the case. The same 3 tier ships were used
to put down Gaulish sailors by Claudius in preperation for his
invasion of Britain and that was well after Actium. 3 tier ships were
part of the equipment produced to invade Britain, IIRC before then the
Romans had no interest in seafaring outside of the Med. Ergo,
something designed especially for the invasion of Britain could not
have been obselete at the time of the invasion of Britain. (I think.)