rrying a square sail. The stays are not
shown, but Homer says that the masts of early Greek vessels were stayed
fore and aft.

It is impossible to say whether this vessel was decked. According to
Thucydides, the ships which the Athenians built at the instigation of
Themistocles, and which they used at Salamis, were not fully decked.
That Greek galleys were sometimes without decks is proved by Fig. 10,
which is a copy of a fragment of a painting of a Greek galley on an
Athenian vase now in the British Museum, of the date of about 550 B.C.
It is perfectly obvious, from the human figures in the galley, that
there was no deck. Not even the forecastle was covered in. The galleys
of Figs. 8 and 9 had, unlike the Phoenician bireme of Fig. 7, no
fighting-deck for the use of the soldiers. There was also no protection
for the upper-tier rowers, and in this respect they were inferior to the
Egyptian ship shown in Fig. 6. It is probable that Athenian ships at
Salamis also had no fighting, or flying decks for the use of the
soldiers; for, according to Thucydides, Gylippos, when exhorting the
Syracusans, nearly sixty years later, in 413 B.C., said, "But to them
(the Athenians) the employment of troops on deck is a novelty." Against
this view, however, it must be stated that there are now in existence at
Rome two grotesque pictures of Greek galleys on a painted vase, dating
from about 550 B.C., in which the soldiers are clearly depicted standing
and fighting upon a flying deck. Moreover, Thucydides, in describing a
sea-fight between the Corinthians and the Corcyreans in 432 B.C.,
mentions that the decks of both fleets were crowded with heavy infantry
archers and javelin-men, "for their naval engagements were still of the
old clumsy sort." Possibly this last sentence gives us a clue to the
explanation of the apparent discrepancy. The Athenians were, as we know,
expert tacticians at sea, and adopted the method of ramming hostile
ships, instead of lying alongside and leaving the fighting to the troops
on board. They may, however, have been forced to revert to the latter
method, in order to provide for cases where ramming could not be used;
as, for instance, in narrow harbours crowded with shipping, like that of
Syracuse.

It is perfectly certain that the Phoenician ships which formed the
most important part of the Persian fleet at Salamis carried
fighting-decks. We have seen already (p. 28) that they used such decks
in the time of Senn