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Hello everyone and welcome to the third podcast of Ancient Warfare Magazine.

We're discussing today the Age of the Trirem, the theme of the June-July issue of Ancient Warfare 2008.

And with me are Paul McDonald's staff and Murray Dom.

It's good evening to you guys, I think.

Indeed.

And Angus Wallace is recording this again for the History Network.

Today we're going to talk about some subjects that really haven't had the attention they

deserve in this issue. And I would like to start out with really the arms race that led to the

development of the trirem and also led to its supersession and final disappearance from the naval lists in the end in Imperial Rome.

One of you guys want to take it away?

I'll be brave about it.

Probably most people know that in Homer we hear of triacontas, 30-aud pentacontas 50 odd boats 25 aside and when you get to

pentacontas you just about reach the limit of length for a wooden a wooden boat without it bowing and flexing in waves. So in order to increase ore power, the next thing

you needed to do was to, instead of oarsmen just in the middle position, as it were, in

pentacontas, they put more oarsmen down in the cargo space

and created the bioreen and of course once they got the idea of uh of that it was a relatively small

step to figuring out that you could put an outrigger on the top and sit oarsmen above the gunwale above the edge of the

of the boat and create a trirem and thus have triple the ore power of a pentaconta in much the same length of

...