Greetings first of all I am student studying Accounting and happen to have taken a classics elective. I took classics course because I love reading about anything interesting about history from Rockefeller to Ceasar you name it.
Right now we are tasked with writing a wiki page. We were to select a topic from a pool chosen by our instructor. We have to write a 500 word wiki about our selected topic and how it relates to democracy in Athens. I happen to choose triremes out of the pool.
I just want advice on what I should be asking myself when writing this "wiki". I don't really understand what "How trireme relates to democracy?" means. How do I approach it?
So far I have some excerpts from the following:
I have read quite a bit about Triremes, but I still do not know what to write. I would really appreciate any advice on how to approach this research project given to me.
The trireme is a lot more relevant to Athenian democracy than it may seem. You have some good sources already, but I'll go through and suggest some others that you may find useful to build up your wiki.
The key question to ask is what a trireme is, or more specifically, what makes a trireme different from earlier kinds of ships used by the Greeks. The two main points are that firstly a trireme is much bigger (needing four times as many crew as a pentekonter), and secondly that a trireme, unlike earlier ships, is only a warship. It cannot be used effectively for raiding or piracy or trade. It carries too many mouths and doesn't have enough room in the hull for anything besides rowers. Building triremes, then, means building a battle fleet. And their large crew meant that they were terribly expensive, and laid claim to a lot of manpower. Try to get a hold of Hans van Wees' Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute (2012), which lays this out in some detail.
How does that relate to democracy? Well, with our basic understanding of triremes as large, expensive weapons of war, we can ask some fundamental questions that should lead you to the answer:
Many ancient sources spell out the answers to these questions. Have a look at the pamphlet called the Constitution of the Athenians, written in the 420s BC by an anonymous author known to modern scholars as the Old Oligarch. You'll find very similar sentiments in Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, and Plutarch's Life of Themistokles and Life of Perikles. Fundamentally, what you need to be doing is to substantiate this claim by Aristotle:
But [the current democratic system] does not seem to have come about in accordance with the intention of Solon, but rather as a result of accident, for the common people having been the cause of the naval victories at the time of the Persian invasion became proud and adopted bad men as popular leaders when the respectable classes opposed their policy.
-- Aristotle, Politics 1274a.10-14
I hope this helps!
Military service is closely linked to political authority throughout the history of the ancient Greeks.
Of the many ways a man could contribute physically to his community, the most respected was when he placed his body, and thus his life, between the community and an enemy in its defence. The act of bearing arms in defence of the community was a physical display of his commitment to the community as a whole and thus could also indicate that any council he gave in regards to the community could be trusted. It also indicates that he should be listened to when he speaks in council, for by risking his life in the communities defence he has strongly shown he has vested concern in the community as a whole beyond just his personal or familial fortunes. Thus there is a close link between a man’s role as a fighter and his role as a citizen.
The first major display of this affect was when the primary form of military power shifted from cavalry, whos prohibitive expense made the role unattainable for anyone but the aristocracy, to the phalanx formation of many men equipped with standardized equipment, the hoplite panoply.
Many more people were needed and could afford to adopt a valuable role in battle. Gone were flashy shows of individual bravado of the aristocrats, instead it relied on strong group cohesion and trust as much of your protection relied on the man next to you. Every man became equally valuable in the battle.
If the common man was just as valuable in battle as the aristocrat, then they argued they deserved equal access to political power.
As the phalanx was adopted by all the hellenic polis, essentially all the male citizen soldiers of these states gained some increase in their level of political power, though in many different forms.
The trireme was another game changing military technology. It provided naval domination to whoever had the best and most skilled navy. It took skill and training to effectively row these warships so they could not use slaves but instead hired poorer citizens who could not afford to serve as hoplites. Suddenly another broad portion of society became militarily vital, and in Athens who relied heavily on its navy, they demanded the same rights that the hopplites before them demanded.
Thus power went from the elites, to those self sufficient enough to afford hoplite arms, to pretty much any citizen who could be trained to row a trireme.