A Ghost Ship Comes to Life: the Reconstruction and Operation of a Fifth Century BCE Athenian Warship

The Greek trireme, a rowed warship with three banks of oars on each side and a metal ram in the bow, was a technological marvel of the ancient world: one that saved Greek civilization during the Persian Wars.  No actual wrecks have survived, but in the 1980s two scholars, using a wide range of historical and archaeological sources, supervised a full-scale reconstruction of such a ship.  From 1989 to 1991 this ship, the Olympias, underwent sea trials with an oar crew of British and American rowers.  Professor S. Ford Weiskittel, one of the organizers of the oar crew, has written and spoken extensively on the entire project.