A few moons back I was trying to read up on some ancient naval battles and particularly on ramming. There seems to have been only a half dozen or so bronze rams ever found.
Certainly old rams would have been recycled from scrapped ships and damaged and old units melted down for new ones but with such a large number of ancient warships we should have more.
I’ve never heard of anyone actually searching at Salamis, Actium, Aegates or any other old battle site for sunken goodies like shields, armor, weapons, ship fittings, cauldrons and above all rams since they would be the easiest things to locate.
I wish I was a billionaire like Paul Allen.
:<{
Somewhere on FR there was a topic (circa 2005? 2006?) regarding some armor that were apparently from Actium; I remember it, but a search a few years ago didn’t turn it up. A bronze ram I believe has been found on the sea floor.
Likeliest place to find bronze rams would be on a wreck carrying salvage — they recycled metals just as we do today. As you said, a bronze ram would be reused if possible.
According to the late Lionel Casson, there was an arms race of sorts during Classical Greek / Hellenistic times, with larger and larger warships, to the point that the pinnacle development was too large ever to be used. The Romans conquered Greece, liked the ship (still tied to the dock where it entered service), and towed it to Rome, where it became a tourist attraction.
The upshot is, when warships with rams got replaced, they were replaced by a larger version, and the bronze rams would have been newly built to fit, psssibly reusing previous rams by melting them down (not sure that works with classical bronze).