That from rowboats rather than from sail-boats should have been developed the highest type of Mediterranean war-vessel of ancient times is not surprising when one remembers the light and variable winds of that region, the usually smooth seas, the abundance of harbors, and, above all, the need of having the vessels under complete control when all fighting had to be done at short range—chiefly by ramming and boarding, in fact. It must be remembered, too, that labor was cheap; and it was considered that the most proper and economical—not to say humane—use to which prisoners of war could be put was to make them rowers in public ships, while enough remained to be sold as slaves to the owners of private yachts and privateering galleys. One may imagine a worse fate than this. The earliest war-vessels of the eastern Mediterranean—those of Homer’s time, for instance—seem to have been long and rather narrow rowboats, the best of which had two tiers of oars, one above the other, the lower, shorter tier working through oval holes in the side, and the upper in notches or thole-pins on the gunwale. This left the upper rowers exposed, and hence such vessels were called _aphract_, or “unfenced”; and it was not until the Greeks began to become prominent that the bulwarks were raised high enough to protect all the rowers, and war-vessels generally became _cataphract_, or “fenced.” It appears that in very early times war-ships (_biremes_) with not only two tiers or banks of oars, but even those (_triremes_) with three banks, were used; and the trireme became the type of the most numerous and effective vessels of the Greek and Roman navies in their prime. And as weight and power gradually increased, the crushing power of collision began to be utilized, and ramming came in as a more and more important feature in naval tactics. As the Greeks seem to have first applied these new ideas, it is quite likely that their success at Salamis was due to these improvements. The arrangement was this: From the side of the vessel (inside) projected three rows of benches, a yard apart, horizontally supported at their inner ends by timbers that slanted toward the stern at such an angle that the top seat of each row was exactly above the bottom seat of the row behind it. The oars of the top tier (_thranite_) were about fourteen feet long, those of the middle tier (_zygite_) about ten and one half feet, and the lowermost one (_thalamite_) seven and one half feet. Each oar was so nearly balanced in its oar-port as to work in the easiest manner, tied there by a thong and surrounded by a loose sleeve of leather which kept out the water. Each one of the lowermost oars was worked by a single man, the middle ones by two, and those of the third tier by three or four, as they were of great length.