A War Like No Other

And so think about what gravity and the lack of airflow and all these sorts of things are gonna result in.

Victor Davis Hanson, in his book A War Like No Other, about the Peloponnesian War, describes the horrible conditions for the thalamites as follows, quote, "The sweat from the two superior banks of rowers, the posteriors of the seamen above were more or less in the thalamites' faces, drenched them as well." The comic poet Aristophanes joked that the thalamites were often farted upon and even showered with excrement from the straining oarsmen above, a scatological reference that he may have derived from the common and collective real-life miseries of the veterans in the theater audience.

Sweat, thirst, blisters, exhaustion, urine, and feces.

All this was in addition to the billows of the sea and the iron of the enemy, end quote.

And so while, again, on average, they were the best, there still would have been a lot of variation between individuals or between individual ships even.

Just like in navies today, some ships are gonna be better run and just through luck have a, you know, higher quality of crew.

But when it comes to rowers, Victor Davis Hanson, in A War Like No Other, hypothesizes, but I think very, very plausibly, about the sorts of men who probably tended to be the best rowers most of the time.

Quote, "Experience seems to be the requisite for rowing excellence, so it is probable that many of the best rowers were in their 30s and 40s, and, at Athens at least, veterans of dozens of campaigns when the Peloponnesian War broke out." End quote.