It has never been established beyond question what is meant by banks of oars, or whether the Greek text has been interpreted correctly when it is taken to express forty superimposed banks of oars. From constructional reasons it may be assumed that a ship having forty superimposed banks of oars never existed, and it is very doubtful whether ships having more than a fourth of that number of banks passed beyond the imaginations of their inventors. In any case they were soon dispensed with, and in course of time it was found that the best results were obtained with galleys having two or three banks of oars. It is not definitely known how the rowers were disposed in the ships of anything over seven or eight banks. If any vessels had forty banks of oars, the upper rows must have been of an absolutely unwieldy length. Assuming the oars to have been weighted with lead so that the inborne and outborne portions were equally balanced, they must nevertheless have been exceedingly difficult to row even by a number of men, and it was impossible for any rowers to have moved these great oars at the same speed as the men at the lower banks moved their lighter and shorter ones. That some such difficulty was experienced, even in biremes and triremes, is shown by the arrangement of the oars, whereby all in a bank were not of equal length, but were graded so that those nearer the ends of the banks were longer in order that all the blades might enter the water in a straight line. Each row above must have had its own line in the water a little farther away from the side of the ship than the row beneath it, or the blades would have interfered with each other and the rowers thrown into hopeless confusion. The tremendous amount of lead that would have to be carried to counterbalance the outborne portions of several hundred oars would add materially to the dead weight to be propelled, and, much of it being placed high above the water, the stability of the vessel would be lessened. The Athenians used leather or skin aprons or covers over the oar holes to prevent the water entering, the oar passing through a hole in the leather, and the apron was bound to the oar in such a way as to be watertight. This contrivance was widely adopted later. The oar ports were constructed between the ribs, but the oars instead of being rowed against the ribs were pulled against thongs fastened to the next rib, thus minimising the strain upon the ship’s structure and preventing the oars being lost overboard. One man one oar was apparently the general rule at that time.