Octavian, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium

This topic was posted 1/9/2023, just an update and sidebar.

The rest of the Battle of/Actium keywords, sorted:

What Was The Biggest Naval Battle In History? [02/04/2021]
Monument Offers Clues to Size of Cleopatra's Unwieldy Ships [04/01/2019]
Make It So! Sayeth Cleopatra [06/21/2016]
Villa Owned by Ben-Hur's Rival Identified [02/19/2015]

My 40 Year Search for the Battle of Actium by Dr. William Murray | 1:30:36
ArchaeologyTV | 8.09K subscribers | 1,679 views | June 2, 2021

In 31 BC, Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra in a naval battle off Cape Actium in Western Greece. A few years later, the victor constructed on the site of his personal camp a grand Victory Monument to commemorate the event. I first visited this site in 1978, and since then, have been trying to explain what I found there: the ruins of a massive rostral display whose complex details preserve evidence for the sizes of Antony's and Cleopatra's largest warships. After a brief attempt to find battle debris in the sea off Cape Actium, I was asked by Dr. Konstantinos Zachos to join his team in analyzing the results of his systematic excavations of the site. His work, conducted over a quarter century, has added much to our knowledge of this important monument—its original design, its elaborately decorated altar, its dedication text, and its period of use. At the same time, emerging 3D technologies have allowed me to comprehend the rostral display more fully, to visualize the monstrous sizes of the ships that fought in the final naval battle, and to restore the text of the dedication inscription. In this lecture, I will summarize the main results of our research, but do so in a personal manner, in the context of my own 40-year journey of discovery in search of the Battle of Actium.

I set the time index to skip the, uh, um, uh, intro. Bad, bad intro.

Transcript
0:01 · great it's working sweet okay um
0:07 · let me admit the last couple people
0:13 · there's another person joining
0:39 · okay i think we're good um and i will get us started now
0:54 · okay and let me start recording on my end too
1:10 · okay one last check
1:22 · everybody's in and nobody's in waiting okay perfect um so
1:29 · um i would like to introduce to you our speaker today um his name is bill
1:36 · murray and uh he is a professor um and are you still
1:44 · teaching actively i am okay that's fantastic um he's a professor
1:51 · at the university of south florida and is director of the ancient studies center there
1:58 · and uh he has a really interesting book called the age of the titans
2:03 · and if you were at archaeology day you heard a little bit of the information from that book about the amazingly large
2:11 · ships that were being used and again that had all been news to me
2:18 · so i'm actually looking at getting your book now because i want to know more um
2:25 · he has had a really really really kind of amazing sort of fairy tale uh life
2:31 · uh in terms of um in the 1960s uh he got to um spent his summers
2:40 · in the virgin islands living aboard a ship with his parents and his two siblings um he learned how
2:46 · to dive um and uh and again it says
2:51 · and face shipped wreck more than once which again come on how many of us get to do
2:57 · that um he attended penn state uh then university of pennsylvania um and
3:05 · moved to greece to study ancient port cities for his phd dissertation
3:10 · and then became fascinated by a warship ram that was found south of
3:16 · haifa and um again he's like since spent his time studying naval warfare um and all
3:24 · things naval um and again it just sounds really really
3:29 · really wonderful um so i'm very much looking forward to hearing from him
3:35 · and uh please join me in welcoming him thank you very much professor melchior
3:41 · for your introduction um you've actually heard about the first quarter of my lecture already
3:48 · so you're all set to go um i was telling her that when i was uh informed
3:55 · that i was going to be this year's uh one of the jokowski lecturers
4:00 · i got really excited because i love traveling around the country and i wanted to come back to your area
4:08 · in particular my first trip to your area for the aia occurred back in the mid 1990s
4:15 · when i came to the university of washington and i was really looking forward to going south of
4:22 · um seattle and seeing your beautiful part of the country i happen to be on sabbatical this
4:28 · semester so i had plans of coming with my wife and i'm spending a few days in the puget
4:33 · sound area but you know the rest of that story it was not to be
4:38 · the aia lecture program has been relegated to these webinars and i'm very happy to be able to do that but
4:46 · um i would much rather be sitting with you all in the great northwest i think that
4:51 · would be great and i'd seek out some seafood if i could because i remember seafood from there is just
4:57 · awesome so my lecture this evening is about an aspect of my research that i
5:04 · really never expected when i started my career over 40 years ago it's about my
5:10 · career-long fascination with a single research topic the battle of actium
5:16 · this battle was fought on september 2nd 31 bc between the forces of
5:22 · octavian the future emperor augustus and his rival for power at that time
5:28 · mark anthony aided by his ally and paramour cleopatra the seventh of egypt
5:36 · i found this to be a research topic that i just can't lay to rest and the purpose of this
5:42 · lecture is to tell you why we'll start out with its importance it
5:47 · was certainly an important turning point of history it serves as a convenient dividing line
5:54 · between the hellenistic age and alexander and his successors with augustus and a long line of roman
6:02 · emperors his successors the battle can be seen as the final event in augustus's rise to
6:09 · soul power in the roman state you could say realistically that it is
6:15 · the birth event of the roman empire and finally as we shall see
6:21 · it's the last naval battle of antiquity when medium to large warships
6:26 · fought for control of the mediterranean sea so inherently there's a lot to be
6:32 · interested in with this battle to understand why i became so interested
6:38 · in this topic we have to go back to my high school years when i was 15 my parents built a house
6:44 · which is at the end of that arrow in the main slide um there's a little dot there and they
6:51 · bought a sailboat in the british virgin islands which you see in the inset photo to the right where i spent 12
6:58 · wonderful summers before going to greece toward the end of my graduate school training
7:04 · my time in the virgin islands instilled in me a love for adventure for nature for the sea
7:10 · for sailing and for boats and how boats worked it's when i became fascinated with the
7:16 · culture of maritime peoples and the mechanisms that govern trade by sea
7:22 · this was also where i first learned to scuba dive and also where i explored my first
7:28 · sunken ships and reefs so when it came time to develop a dissertation topic at the
7:34 · university of pennsylvania i decided to pick something that allowed me to satisfy these interests of mine
7:42 · i knew i'd be attending the american school of classical studies in athens
7:47 · so i settled on a topic that allowed me to get into the countryside as well as into the library i was a
7:55 · student of mike jameson who at the time was at penn ended up at stanford university and um
8:01 · he was a big surveyor surveyed the our glid i elected to conduct a survey
8:06 · of the ancient harbor towns of akarna nia or you could call it acronenia a little
8:12 · explored region of western greece that is shown here on my map inside that rectangular box
8:21 · turns out i made an excellent choice of topic my field work was exciting it was
8:28 · challenging but most importantly it was a heck of a lot of fun i bought a motorcycle i took my tent and
8:35 · camping gear out into the greek countryside where i was befriended by the local inhabitants
8:41 · and armed with the written accounts of past travelers and the help of modern shepherds i
8:47 · searched out found and mapped everything from city walls to hill forts to submerged harbors
8:55 · i got to pitch campsites on the remains of ancient cities that hadn't been inhabited for 20
9:01 · centuries and in the process of this magical experience i fell deeply in love with the land and
9:08 · the people of western greece it so happens that the northwest tip
9:15 · of acarnania terminates in cape actium the place off which the battle of actium
9:22 · was fought so it was within the purview of my dissertation research
9:29 · when i first saw the place which you can see here in the slide it was a desolate low-lying land of
9:36 · reeds and marshes you'd never suspect that it served as the site for antony and cleopatra's camp
9:44 · accium was of interest to me because while at penn i had become interested in naval warfare
9:51 · it was fully captivated by what at the time was called the trireme question namely
9:58 · how an ancient galley called the trireme looked and how it actually worked actium
10:05 · involved bigger ships than triremes which only deepened the mystery for me
10:10 · i'd also taken a course on augustus the first roman emperor at penn
10:15 · and i knew that the prevailing opinion on actium was pretty negative
10:21 · the negative view can be summed up nicely in this quote from sir ronald syme published in 1939 let me highlight the
10:29 · important bits here actium was a shabby affair but the young
10:35 · caesar required the glory of a victory that would surpass the greatest in all history
10:41 · so in the official version of the victor actium was transformed into a great
10:47 · naval battle with lavish wealth of convincing artistic convincing and artistic detail
10:55 · in other words in the parlance of the 21st century the hard fought battle at actium was a
11:02 · con it was fake news to fuel octavian's narrative about how he had beaten his rival mark
11:09 · anthony in a glorious battle that's what sign means when he calls it a shabby affair
11:17 · now think about when he wrote this account 1939 given the allies and by this i mean
11:24 · world war ii allies general mistrust of leaders like stalin mussolini and hitler this view was
11:32 · embraced by english-speaking scholars in the decades after syme published his
11:37 · work and those know uh who've attended the
11:43 · american schools regular session the fall semester is devoted to trips
11:49 · around greece to archaeological sites so on one of our trips we visited necopolis
11:56 · the victory city built by octavian after the battle of actium
12:02 · as part of our visit we stopped at the monument octavian built on the site of his personal camp
12:09 · although i had no idea this site would captivate my interest for 40 years to come
12:14 · i knew this was a special place as you can see from my journal entry for this visit
12:20 · while others poked through the brambles i pulled out a tape measure and furiously took notes on a few of the
12:27 · exposed niches that were cut into a long retaining wall which you see in the main image the
12:35 · right image displays some of what i wrote our leader colin edmundson also from the
12:41 · university of washington told us that this was a large rostral
12:46 · monument and that the holes somehow corresponded to the bows of the ships
12:52 · that fought in the battle the rostral monument as rostra on it or bronze rams so he said
12:59 · rams were sticking out of this wall but none of us at the time knew how the holes that we were looking at
13:04 · corresponded to warship rams despite this fact my final statement in
13:10 · my entry was somewhat prescient i wrote i am gazing at the boughs
13:15 · of anthony and cleopatra's warships a study of these cuttings might prove interesting and then we went
13:22 · on to another site as chance would have it the key to
13:27 · understanding those holes in the wall was pulled from the sea floor 15 kilometers south of haifa israel
13:36 · in november 1980 this occurred when an intact warship ram was discovered 100
13:43 · meters from the shore by a graduate student named joshua ramon
13:48 · following a storm i happened to learn of this discovery during the summer of 1983
13:54 · from israeli colleagues when i was in israel to excavate herod's harbor at caesarea which is located further
14:02 · down the coast from atlet toward the south not knowing what to expect my wife and i
14:08 · took the bus up to haifa to see what all the fuss was about
14:13 · we found the weapon in the garage of the national maritime museum just having been removed from its water
14:20 · tank so we were able to get up close and personal with it with my new bride as scale i took this
14:28 · picture looking to the looking into the back side of the ram and you see here some of the wooden
14:34 · timbers inside the weapon that were being carefully removed by the
14:39 · museum conservators at the time what immediately struck me was the shape
14:46 · of the ram's backside because it reminded me of the niches or ram
14:51 · sockets i'd seen five years earlier at necopolis
14:57 · the ram itself shown here in a side view was at the same time beautiful and
15:03 · deadly physically it was a massive chunk of bronze an industrial bronze weighing half a ton
15:11 · 1028 pounds when it was found it still had 16 timbers from the
15:17 · warship's bow that once carried it you can see them protruding from the back of the ram in the in the right
15:24 · upper image i immediately noticed
15:29 · that the symbols on the side of the ram's cowl were similar to those on ptolemaic coins
15:36 · and so i came to the conclusion that the ram probably came from an egyptian ship i remember talking to the museum
15:42 · director about this and he said no no no no we've we've decided something else so that
15:48 · spurred me when i came back to the states to search through coin catalogs of various
15:54 · collections and i came up with a likely date range of
16:00 · 204-164 bc with its life likely place of manufacture at paphos
16:06 · on cyprus that is judging from these symbols so during the reigns of ptolemy v or
16:14 · ptolemy vi while most everybody ood and odd over
16:20 · the bronze casting which was fantastic those who study wooden ships
16:25 · oohed an odd over the wood inside the casting here were preserved 16 timbers from an
16:33 · ancient ramming warship such a thing had never been found before
16:38 · a respected expert on wooden ships j richard steffy was asked to help extract
16:44 · the timbers and study them he explained them to us in an important
16:49 · publication that explains how the ram both functioned to focus the impact of the ramming blow on
16:57 · the enemy ship and act as a shock absorber that transferred
17:03 · the recoil or the reciprocal shock through the large timbers on the
17:09 · bottom of the warship that carried the ram large timbers like the port and starboard whales and those were the two
17:16 · big pieces of wood that you saw inside the ram with my wife sitting beside it
17:22 · in this way the attacking ship could shatter their enemies hull but not damage their own it was a
17:29 · brilliant design and obviously the result of many years of trial and error
17:34 · the next question that everybody became fixated on was this did this magnificent ram come from a big
17:42 · ship a medium ship or a small ship the answer to this question was
17:49 · preserved in the actium war monument i had seen five years earlier at necopolis
17:55 · when i first visited the site there i saw clearly that there were different sized holes in the wall or as i prefer
18:02 · to call them now ram sockets like a light bulb socket it was very likely i thought that one of
18:09 · the sizes would match up with the athlete ram and then would allow us to see relatively speaking whether it was
18:16 · in the middle range or the big range or the small range let me show you before we continue how
18:22 · these rams fit into their sockets first of all you have to remove the wood the ram
18:27 · is chock full of uh wood and the wood cross section you see in the upper left slide so you get your
18:35 · chisel out and your hammer and you start whacking away at that wood until you've removed it look at the
18:41 · upper right slide between the red line the two red lines on the back end of the ram once you've
18:48 · removed the wood from there there's a hollow that hollow then
18:54 · will slip into the socket leaving intact the core which you see
19:00 · in the sort of central lower image and that core replicates the wood that you've
19:07 · chiseled out from the inside of the ram if we look at the back of the athlete
19:13 · ram you'll see that there is sort of a light blue exterior that light blue exterior
19:19 · would represent the groove or the hole that would be the socket for
19:24 · the athlete ram if you look at the right image the colored green
19:29 · and orange portion shows you what would be the core or the area where
19:35 · the wood was removed from inside the ram and the dotted lines on those two images
19:40 · give you the height of the course on the monument at necopolis and allows you to compare that
19:48 · ram with the one to the next to it which is socket number 13.
19:54 · so if we could find a socket like what you see on the right hand side
19:59 · it would go a long way toward answering the question about the relative size of the athlete ship
20:06 · so you can't just go into the greek countryside and start whacking away at the weeds
20:12 · policemen will come and arrest you and throw you in jail so now i had to get permission from the greek government
20:19 · to examine the sockets at necopolis the main map of the slide shows you the
20:25 · location of necopolis in relationship to the places i've already mentioned athlete is on the eastern or the right
20:32 · side of the map alexandria which i'll mention in a moment is toward the bottom right and then necopolis is sort of dead sent
20:39 · dead set in the center of the map the city uh was established after
20:46 · uh octavian's victory it means victory city it was establi it was established about
20:52 · two years after his victory at uh actium and it was established on the north side
20:58 · of the straits which you can see in the inset map in the lower left of the slide
21:04 · this is where octavian's army had camped during the summer-long war with anthony
21:10 · the location of the city was well chosen and it prospered and became a regional economic center
21:17 · for northwestern greece for many centuries notice that in this view we're to the
21:22 · north of the city and i'm looking south toward the actium straits same thing is true with the
21:28 · the inset map in the lower right it seems clear from the excavations that
21:35 · have been carried out at the city that one of the first monuments of this city was the victory monument
21:41 · built on the site of octavian's praetorium his official army camp as you can see
21:49 · from the reconstruction here the monument sat on a hill above the city's theater and stadium
21:55 · which was in the sanctuary where the actium games were held these games were held every four years
22:02 · as part of an olympic cycle that meant they were equal to the olympic games and they served to further glorify the
22:09 · establishment of rome's order in greece here you can see the site of the victory
22:15 · monument from the upper seats of the theater and i show you this view to illustrate the fact that the monument
22:22 · was visible from all parts within the new city this was intended to be the premier
22:28 · monument of this new city okay if you want to study a monument in
22:33 · greece i've told you this you got to apply to the government for official permission and you do this through the american
22:39 · school in athens with their help i received a permit to do the work so long as i
22:45 · involved the previous excavator at the site a man named fodius pedsas a well-known greek archaeologist who in
22:53 · a sense became my sponsor so in may of 1986
22:58 · i showed up at the site with my wife and two students from the university of south florida
23:04 · after the chernobyl nuclear disaster had spewed radiation all over europe that came down with the
23:10 · spring rains as greeks panicked about their yogurt supplies
23:16 · from sheep who were eating contaminated grass i asked my students to wade with me into
23:24 · these glowing weeds with hoes called zappas and pruning shears and after two days of work
23:31 · we uncovered about 26 different sized niches into which the rams were placed from
23:36 · anthony and cleopatra's ships i present in this slide at the bottom
23:42 · photos of the six different sizes that we found and to my amazement
23:48 · the half ton athlete ram was too small to fit into any of these sockets
23:59 · let's pause for a moment to consider more fully what was displayed here
24:04 · as i told you earlier these were the rams taken from the fleet of mark anthony and cleopatra the seventh of
24:11 · egypt following their defeat at the hands of octavian the adoptive son of julius caesar after caesar's death
24:20 · on the ides of march 44 bc anthony and the young caesar jockeyed
24:25 · with one another for power in the roman state after a period of 12 years of an uneasy
24:32 · relationship anthony brought an invasion force out of the eastern mediterranean toward
24:39 · italy this was the showdown between these two he had with him the queen of egypt the
24:46 · former mistress of the older caesar and now his consort with whom he had
24:52 · fathered two children they sailed out of the eastern mediterranean to greece
24:57 · and took up a position around the ambration gulf from whence they plan to cross to italy
25:03 · in the spring of 31 bc and advance from the ports of tarantum and brandisium on rome
25:10 · you can see all of these places on the map that forms the main view in the slide they never got the
25:17 · chance to do this because octavian moved the large force to western greece
25:23 · and fought them for control of the sea far away from italy's shores
25:29 · the region of the final conflict was around the shores of the ambrasian gulf with octavian's forces to the north the
25:37 · left of the slide and anthony's to the south to the right of the slide
25:44 · during the summer of 31 octavian's admiral marcus agrippa picked off anthony's
25:50 · naval supply graze bases in greece one by one in order to hinder
25:56 · his troops from receiving their food supplies it was a success by august the situation
26:03 · for anthony's men was dire they were sick demoralized
26:08 · and were now suffering from diminishing food as a result anthony was forced to burn
26:14 · those ships he could not man and to fight his way out of the gulf
26:20 · whose entrance now was blocked by octavian's fleet i show
26:25 · you in the photographic image on this slide uh the actium straights we are to the north
26:31 · of the actium straights and we are looking down southward toward the island of leokos which laid in the path of the
26:39 · fleet of antony if it was going to escape this will be important in a moment
26:46 · it's important to keep in mind that our narrative of this action told to us by the historians plutarch
26:52 · and dio cassius follows an official version that was preferred by the victors
26:59 · in this official version we're told that anthony's fleet was full of ships that were huge
27:05 · uselessly huge and furthermore they were staffed by foreigners who were also useless
27:11 · so the ships were were ineffective as a matter of fact they were a liability because they were so big
27:18 · as anthony moved his ships through the actium straits
27:24 · octavian brought in ships to block his exit and that's what this map is showing um
27:31 · around six to eight am in the morning he probably brought his ships in from the south and from the north
27:36 · and they formed up like this so that by mid morning both sides were lined up at
27:43 · the entrance to the gulf boughs aimed toward one another then
27:49 · around 11 a.m when the sea breeze began to fill in slowly anthony was forced to advance away from
27:56 · the shore he needed to get westward enough to miss the island of lao cost to the south
28:02 · which you saw in that previous photographic image so that when he raised his sails he
28:09 · could get away at least this is what we're told his plan was
28:15 · in 2002 i had a graduate student named michael garcia
28:21 · who owns a large-scale printing business that prints stadium graphics for college
28:26 · and pro football teams he elected to make a scaled map of the battle zone
28:32 · for his seminar paper so that the seminar members could plot the battle
28:37 · using scaled warships that he also printed up it was a heck of a lot of fun and it
28:44 · taught me that we'll probably never know the exact detail of the battle because there are simply too many unknowable
28:52 · variables when you're moving a ship from position a to position b
28:57 · so we plotted out the battle but the way in which the ships went from stage one to stage two to stage three
29:04 · was flying by the seat of our pants garcia's map was so large that we had to
29:11 · do our exercise on a basketball court which you see here in fact we learned in 2006 that this map
29:18 · was deemed the 16th largest map in the world it was 55 feet by 73 feet in extent
29:27 · you can see here the point at which the fleets engaged this is useful in showing the physical
29:33 · extent of the battle lines because they stretched for miles octavian's fleet took up a position that
29:40 · literally was six miles long it showed us as well that
29:45 · a gap developed in anthony's line uh behind which lay the egyptian squadron of 60 ships
29:52 · and it had to develop in the line because he didn't have enough ships to cover the front of octavian's six
30:00 · mile long line according to the official version of the
30:06 · battle as the sea breeze began to blow stronger and both sides
30:11 · engaged cleopatra's squadron broke free and fled before the outcome was certain
30:19 · anthony we're told did the same thing then we're told octavian's lighter ships
30:24 · made gang attacks on the larger ships of anthony's fleet whose vessels
30:30 · were too slow to move and as a result of that they were disabled or burned with fire
30:37 · and in the end the valor of the roman marines carried the day
30:42 · the battle was a resounding victory for octavian and for rome over a foreign enemy
30:49 · that's the official version can we accept this version well let's just say their
30:56 · problems in general i tend to be skeptical of ancient battle accounts
31:01 · and that's because i'm a follower of this guy nathan watley who wrote an important study of the
31:08 · battle of marathon back in the 1960s now what he wrote about marathon is
31:14 · really a lot less important than what he made uh than his observations about general battles battles in particular
31:22 · battles in general that's what i mean to say he argues persuasively that we don't
31:27 · generally pro uh uh possess sufficient evidence for a proper reconstruction of both
31:33 · of most battles for example there are no expert observers for most
31:39 · battles no written orders no correspondence between generals and their staff
31:46 · no attempt to form a battle narrative immediately after the event when people's
31:51 · minds are fresh their memories are fresh furthermore the participants who might have provided
31:57 · eyewitness accounts and who did later on had a poor view of the action they were
32:03 · pumped up on adrenaline and they weren't thinking in a level-headed logical and impartial manner and i've always got to think of
32:10 · what would happen if you were on the ship at the end of that six mile long line of octavian you'd have no idea what was going on at
32:16 · the other end in the case of actium we suspect that augustus himself
32:23 · selectively crapped it crafted the narrative that he wanted posterity to remember
32:28 · and he inserted it in his autobiography that we know was published somewhat sometime between 25 and 22 bc
32:36 · that is less than 10 years after the event we presume this official account was
32:42 · followed by all the historians of the post-action generation
32:48 · because augustus had so much sway over the generation that followed him so this is
32:55 · what i mean when i refer to the official account of the victors it's got octavian's fingerprints all
33:02 · over it the time he wrote it augustus's fingerprints but do we go as far as the historians
33:09 · william tarn and ronald syme in denying that a real battle took place on september 2nd
33:17 · these were the historians who so influenced my professors at penn
33:23 · i don't think so and that's because we have information about the warships that was not available to either of
33:30 · these two scholars writing in the 1930s and this might allow us to make informed
33:36 · deductions based on the military hardware used by each side something that nathan watley said
33:42 · you should use as evidence in reconstructing a battle we've got some additional evidence the
33:48 · numbers of warships that were damaged or that escaped during the battle may also provide us with additional
33:55 · clues concerning the existence or non-existence of a battle of actium let's start with
34:02 · the sockets themselves and what they can tell us about the ships that fought in the battle
34:08 · in 1986 as we laboriously measured the sockets by manually probing their
34:14 · interiors with a measuring device that went centimeter by centimeter by centimeter from top to
34:21 · bottom from left to right i fantasized about having a star trek
34:26 · tricorder to do the work for us how cool how easy it would be if we could
34:31 · just whip out like dr spock cause do like mr spock is doing here and uh you know wave some little wand in
34:38 · front of the socket and have it be recorded well now you can the passage of years
34:44 · didn't provide a tricorder but it did provide some new recording and visualization techniques
34:50 · that were just as effective what was good enough in 1986
34:55 · can now be improved upon markedly with laser scanners and with photogrammetry i
35:02 · suppose to be honest this change in technology is one of the big reasons why i've been
35:08 · able to maintain my interest in a single problem for 40 years i kept seeing how each new technological
35:15 · breakthrough would allow me to extract more and more information from the monument
35:22 · for example on the advice of a younger colleague who was more knowledgeable about
35:27 · scanners than i was i used a simple cheap scanner that worked with an apple
35:32 · ipad the thing could be operated by one person and it produced measurable 3d models that allowed me to
35:40 · do things i could only dream of in 1986 and i mean more useful things than just
35:46 · spinning it around for your benefit here on this slide
35:51 · for example in 1986 i could only photograph the socket
35:57 · number 13 which you see on the upper left and present it through rough profiles of
36:02 · its contours which we produced through those manual uh profiles that we took
36:09 · by 2009 i could make a 3d model that recorded all the nooks and crannies
36:15 · of the socket grooves which is the blue image to the right of the socket photo
36:20 · i could then highlight the groove the red slice that you see
36:26 · and then i could cut this slice away from the model which is the next image to the right and
36:32 · then i could rotate this slice 90 degrees to show you how it replicates the back
36:40 · end of the ram that occupied its interior actually there is enough information in
36:46 · the model to produce a ram that will fit into its recess and we used it to reverse engineer seven
36:54 · different rams from seven different sockets of different sizes
37:00 · i can then show you how the thing slides into its socket like this
37:08 · i could only think of that in my brain as i sat before the monument in 1986 and now when i show this to people they
37:14 · go ah that's how it works then there were advances in a technique
37:20 · called photogrammetry that allowed me to merge hundreds of photos together to produce a 3d model
37:27 · in 1986 i laboriously created a photo mosaic of the ram sockets
37:33 · i took a bunch of black and white photographs and then when i came back to florida printed them on 8 by 10 photo
37:40 · paper and then glued the photos together a portion a portion of which you see in
37:45 · the upper image but i could never string them all side by side because i didn't if you
37:51 · printed them they printed out on a on a page and looked like a row of postage stamps
37:57 · 31 years later i took 600 digital photos over the course of three days i fed them
38:05 · into a computer program called reality capture and created a 3d model that i can
38:10 · actually measure let's see if i can show you there those are the positions of the photo
38:18 · views that were taken of the monument the monument starts in the upper left of that image and moves to the lower right of
38:25 · that image each one of those blue rectangles represents a photo and i took all of
38:31 · those photos threw them into this program and it created a 3d model that i can actually
38:36 · measure or turn into an animation like you're looking at here which gives you a real sense of the full
38:42 · extent of the retaining wall with its sockets and doesn't look quite like a row of
38:48 · postage stamps like my earlier reconstruction did let's wait till we get to the end of the
38:54 · monument here keep in mind this southeast this last portion of the monument that's caused me lots of
39:01 · problems another thing that aided my attempt to
39:07 · understand the missing rams was the discovery of three substantial fragments
39:12 · from the rams themselves that were found when the site was excavated
39:18 · the largest of these fragments weighs 6 kilos roughly 13 pounds and came from the port
39:24 · or starboard lower fin of its ram you see a picture of that fragment in the upper left and
39:30 · lower right and the portion of the ram that i believe it came from in the upper right photograph
39:38 · using the thickness of these fragments as a guide i was able to take my reverse engineered
39:45 · 3d models figure out the volumes of those rams and then calculate their
39:51 · weights as expected the largest ram was quite heavy the one that you see depicted in the
39:57 · upper right image if we've done it right would have weighed more than four tons
40:04 · keep that in mind the athlete ram weighs half a ton
40:10 · you know time can be a wonderful research aid if you live long enough more useful
40:16 · discoveries come your way that answer old questions and admittedly create new ones
40:22 · for example off the western coast of sicily researchers have found the debris field
40:29 · caused by a naval battle between rome and carthage in 241 bc
40:35 · since 2007 they've been pulling up rams from the sea floor which you see there in the left
40:42 · image as of today 23 rams have been found and 19 of them have been recovered
40:49 · in 2012 i was asked to visit the project by the archaeological director
40:54 · and since that time i've joined the project as one of their pis and serve as their ancient historian
41:02 · this is great stuff again it's a lot of fun
41:07 · can you see how all this information seduced me to continue my interest in actium
41:13 · now let's put everything together and see what we've got the upper image shows a comparison
41:20 · between the seven action rams we've reverse engineered from the sockets 4 6 8 11 13 18 and 22
41:30 · plus the half ton athlete ram and finally the first eggety ram that was found
41:36 · which weighs a diminutive 165 kilos
41:42 · from this information we can now be certain about the uses of the large warships in anthony's fleet
41:48 · say the ones from fives to sixteens they were built for their ramming power
41:55 · their ram sizes show us they were designed to excel in frontal ramming attacks which we know
42:01 · dominated many battles of this period because they were fought around the confines of
42:06 · harbor entrances this explains the massive sizes of the actium rams
42:12 · and their shock absorber timbers inside them if you look at the athlete ram i
42:19 · have an orange rectangle there that represents the timbers that absorb the shock of the
42:25 · collision they also generate the shock of the collision look at number four
42:31 · number four the orange rectangle there which represents the ramming timber
42:36 · whale unit is four times larger than that in the athlete ram
42:43 · if you ran the athlete ram into number four it would be like running a semi into a
42:49 · vw bug or beetle to further place these rams in
42:54 · context let's look briefly at the warship design about which we know the most and then we can talk about the ones
43:01 · about which we don't know very much the one about which we know the most is a classical athenian trireme
43:07 · or a three i'm going to give these ship classes numbers this class of worship
43:13 · had a rowing system with one man per or set at three different levels something that you can
43:19 · see in the upper right image the repeating triad of three men per
43:25 · rowing group gives the name to the design you can see this triad uh on the upper
43:32 · left image you see how you've got that sort of wobbly oval around groups of three three ores well
43:39 · that group of three oars continues itself 26 times down the side of the
43:45 · warship these pictures were taken of the trireme
43:51 · replica olympias that was built by the hellenic navy and launched in 1987.
43:57 · no one says that this ship is exactly like an athenian three but it comes pretty close and it adheres
44:04 · to a lot of what we know about an athenian 3 its length is 125 feet and its width is 18.5
44:14 · feet at the widest point the weight of this ship with a full crew is roughly 40
44:19 · tons think of that running into something and a full crew totaled 200 men
44:27 · including 170 oarsmen in the case here oars people waiting to board on the dock at poros
44:34 · greece many of the warships antony used at actium were larger than the trireme that
44:42 · i've just shown you and he placed on their decks catapults towers
44:47 · and troops of marines which is the auth which the um artist who sculpted the upper left
44:53 · image is trying to impart there is a forward deck tower and then marines were much too big probably
45:00 · for the ship but it it gives you an idea the largest ship that he had in his
45:06 · fleet was classed a ten and we can only guess at its size and complexity
45:12 · we suspect it had two tiers of five man oars and that it was big
45:18 · heavy and beamy that's what the artists have attempted to show in the
45:24 · bottom two images you can see the three on the left image is the upper
45:29 · uh version and that the 10 is the lower version i've added in the rams there
45:34 · and there's an attempt to show what a 10 might have looked at in the lower right image
45:40 · just remember we now know that the ram of a 10 weighed more than 4 tons while we
45:47 · suspect that the rams on triremes weighed less than half a ton
45:56 · the historical accounts tell us that anthony had in his fleet many ships
46:02 · that were larger than were octavians and they give us sizes they say they were sixes sevens eights
46:09 · nines and tens you know what a ten might be like so you can imagine what these other
46:14 · ships might be like variations on that theme i think these big ships were probably
46:21 · cleopatra's idea because her third century forefathers
46:27 · used them to break into fortified harbors i suspect anthony intended to use these
46:34 · large ships on the fortified harbors at brandisium and tarantum in southern italy
46:41 · in other words he and cleopatra were planning to invade italy just like our
46:47 · pro-octavian official sources tell us
46:52 · but their effort founder and it foundered at actium because they never got a chance
46:57 · to use these big ships for their intended purpose octavian used them however as we can see
47:05 · from his victory monument that's what he used them for to impress people who came to see his monument
47:12 · now we finally come to the excavations of the monument which were carried out between 1995
47:19 · and 2017. then they show us how octavian chose to represent his victory over
47:26 · anthony and cleopatra what his engineers did was to create a
47:32 · level terrace where he had set up his praetorium or headquarters
47:38 · they did so by building some heavy retaining walls on the west south and east sides of the slope
47:46 · what's interesting is they form a square and the dimensions of this square measure exactly 200 roman feet
47:54 · by 200 roman feet which polybius tells us is the standard size of a general's
48:00 · praetorium so i'm 100 certain this is where octavian's headquarters were
48:07 · when i was growing up around valley forge in pennsylvania i remember seeing lots of places that
48:13 · said you know george washington slept here octavian slept there
48:19 · on top of the terrace his engineers built a porticus triplex or a three-sided
48:26 · covered colonnade and fragments remain of its columns and roofing elements
48:32 · do you see the terracotta gutters or semas that are decorated with dolphins in the
48:38 · lower portion of the right image and with romulus and remus being suckled by the
48:44 · she-wolf in the right uh in the upper of the lower right image
48:49 · cool little details like that the porticus walls were plastered and
48:55 · were painted as we can tell from thousands of small fragments of colored plaster
49:01 · that came up in the excavations the monument must have been quite impressive as the level of artistry was
49:08 · extremely high and gives us a taste of the archaizing style
49:13 · that would become a hallmark of the augustine age it's already beginning in 29 bc
49:21 · a number of bronze fragments of dedications have also been recovered at the site showing us that here
49:28 · it was a repository for statues bronzes and glass vessels and other less
49:36 · elaborate things like fibuli or clothing pins rings and other small
49:42 · objects at the center of the terrace was the piece de resistance there was a
49:49 · monumental altar that was decorated with two freezes the one on the top
49:55 · showing the actin triumph in rome and the one in the bottom showing a collection of naval and
50:01 · infantry spolia most of the fragments are small having been chiseled off their blocks
50:08 · when the slabs of the freeze were prepared for reuse elsewhere
50:13 · perhaps the most exciting discovery comes from the eastern end kind of the
50:19 · southeastern end of the altar where a section of seven large fragments were not
50:25 · chiseled apart and they depict octavian in the triumphal chariot
50:31 · followed by senators in togas it's truly an amazing part of this monument
50:39 · and then there's the monument's large and beautifully carved dedicatory inscription
50:46 · 36 fragments from this text have been recorded over the years between 1913 and 1998
50:54 · 19 of which have survived to the present day i was assigned the job of restoring the
50:59 · text which i have done as follows commander-in-chief caesar son of the
51:07 · divine julius caesar victor in the war which he waged on behalf of the republic in this region
51:14 · when he was counsel for the fifth time 29 bc and commander in chief for the seventh
51:22 · after peace had been secured on land and sea he consecrated to mars and neptune the
51:27 · camp from which he set forth the battle decorated with naval spoils note
51:34 · he doesn't refer to anthony or cleopatra by name which is perfectly within his character and for
51:40 · him this war was a matter of state business that he took care of for the republic he uses the
51:47 · exact same terminology that he used years later in 14 a.d
51:53 · for the big monument that was set up next to his mausoleum called the race guest eye of the divine
51:59 · augustus perhaps you now understand why i've stuck with this topic for four decades
52:06 · there's a lot here but you still might ask all right what have you learned over the 40 years that you've spent
52:12 · studying this battle and all the available evidence first of all we have not learned
52:19 · precisely how the battle of actium was fought that map project taught me that neither
52:25 · its course nor its character are known to us because they are hidden behind a shroud
52:31 · of propaganda that was intentionally left by the victors but we now know more about the ramming
52:40 · potential of the large ships that accompanied the fleet of anthony and cleopatra and
52:46 · we know why they were included in the fleet we now know as well that the largest
52:53 · warships in anthony and cleopatra's fleet had massive rams and we can reasonably
53:00 · suspect that their inclusion shows the hand of cleopatra who came from a nautical tradition that
53:07 · had employed this size of galley to break into fortified harbors like those they were going to face in
53:14 · brandisium and tarantum in southern italy here's another interesting detail that
53:21 · may or may not mean something the largest rams are displayed on the western and eastern ends of the
53:28 · monument with the smallest ramps between them is this an attempt to mimic the battle
53:34 · line of anthony's fleet in the final battle no way of knowing but it is interesting
53:41 · the total number of rams displayed on the monument and their 35 probably represents
53:47 · a tithe of the total ships captured from the enemy if this is so then it means that
53:54 · octavian's forces captured 350 warships a tithe is a one-tenth
54:00 · dedication 35 times 10 350. he captured 350
54:06 · warships from the 500 ship fleet of anthony and cleopatra during the summer long war
54:13 · if that number for their full fleet is reliable which comes from plutarch 500 then this means that either 150
54:22 · ships 500 minus 350 gives you 150.
54:27 · 150 ships were so badly destroyed that their rams were unavailable for
54:33 · octavian to salvage or it means they managed to escape
54:39 · either way this implies that the final battle on september 2nd when most of the damage
54:45 · occurred was indeed a real battle
54:51 · and this implies that the battle fought on september 2nd was indeed a hot hard-fought battle
54:58 · and that octavian's commemoration of the event at his campsite was not a cynical sham like 20th
55:06 · century scholars maintained well that's important so now we come to the
55:14 · nagging unanswered questions that may keep me on the actium hook so to speak at the monument
55:22 · i still have a big unresolved problem that involves the southeast stretch of wall where the monument was
55:29 · massively repaired in antiquity probably sometime in the second century the issue involves
55:37 · backer blocks that were hidden in the interior of the wall now note here i'm pointing out to you
55:43 · facade blocks these are blocks that are on the surface of the wall and into
55:49 · which were carved the sockets themselves but there are a bunch of blocks that are
55:55 · buried in the wall there backer blocks and they appear at the first second
56:01 · third and fourth course levels and perhaps even further up many of these blocks were knocked free
56:08 · from the monument when this section of the wall collapsed and we found them scattered about when
56:13 · this area was excavated when you gather all of these extra blocks together
56:23 · that were you find that there are 13 of them that were originally designed for a for
56:30 · first course position what i mean by that is these backer blocks show traces and you can see them in that
56:38 · left line of of um of blocks they show traces of having been carved to receive rams
56:46 · but they were never on the exterior so they never could have received rams they're buried in the middle of the wall
56:53 · i'd love to know where did these blocks come from do they represent another rostral display that was
57:00 · disassembled when this monument suffered a catastrophe and they needed extra blocks do they
57:07 · represent mistakes that is mis-carved blocks that were then reused
57:12 · inside the walls construction there's a problem at least one of these
57:18 · blocks comes from a ram that seems to be the size of the athlete ram that is smaller than any of the
57:25 · preserved sockets on the facade of the wall and all of the sockets on the facade of
57:32 · the wall are preserved except for the first socket all the way on the west end
57:38 · why was this smaller size not displayed on the wall in its final phase
57:43 · as i said these kinds of problems are always in the back of my mind waiting for future discoveries or
57:50 · technologies to provide a solution or two and they keep me thinking about
57:55 · uh this project and may involve me with it in the future who knows so now we come to the end
58:04 · i suppose the most important discovery i've made after 40 years of research into the
58:10 · actium topic is that thoughtful field work
58:16 · is still tons of fun and if there is any lesson to be learned from that
58:21 · i suppose it's this if you love what you do then you can keep doing it for a long
58:27 · time four decades in my case when i look back on it all i can think to myself is
58:33 · that's amazing well i've now reached the end of my talk
58:38 · thanks for indulging me on my journey down memory lane
58:50 · let's see if i can shift out of here
58:57 · so we have a first question that has come up in the chat um why would anthony have let his ships
59:03 · get caught in the harbor did he expect octavian to come into the harbor to fight
59:09 · uh good question the answer to that is the fact that anthony used the harbor because it was
59:15 · the best protected anchorage in the entire area when he controlled
59:20 · um he expected i think to um he occupied this area in 32 bc
59:28 · and many scholars have wondered why didn't he as quickly as possible leave this place
59:36 · and continue his invasion of southern italy and we really don't know the answer to that question once
59:44 · octavian brought his forces over and his admiral marcus agrippa began to work agrippa
59:51 · in a slow sort of death managed to take away
59:56 · anthony's bases one by one by one over the course of the months of the
1:00:01 · summer so that by september he was in a pickle he was in a real predicament about
1:00:07 · uh getting out of the gulf prior to that time he was able to get in and out of the gulf bring in food
1:00:13 · supplies because he had these bases on the western coast of greece and he had not lost repeated battles to um marcus
1:00:20 · agrippa so that's the answer to that he he first came there expecting that this would be
1:00:26 · a staging point it was an excellent anchorage on his continued progress toward
1:00:32 · southern italy and uh octavian and his admiral agrippa took steps to make sure
1:00:37 · that that didn't occur
1:00:43 · if you have questions feel free to put an x in the chat and you can also unmute and ask it directly
1:00:54 · um can you infer the dimensions of the poly reams from the socket sizes
1:01:01 · um unfortunately you cannot you can make some general
1:01:07 · and and the guide for this uh can be found in the publication of dick steffy called the athlete ram
1:01:15 · where he tries to make he tries to extrapolate ideas about the mass of the warship that
1:01:22 · carried the athlete ram from just those 16 bow timbers that were
1:01:27 · inside it these sockets preserve the same information
1:01:33 · that we get from looking at a cross section of the timbers inside the athlete ram
1:01:39 · so we can following the guidance of j richard steffy make some
1:01:46 · calculations about the weight per meter of the warship
1:01:53 · that likely carried the ram that is uh reconstructed from the socket itself but as far as the length of the
1:02:00 · ship we cannot reconstruct that as far as the width of the ship we really can't
1:02:06 · reconstruct that either that would have to come from additional information like can we identify
1:02:15 · which ram comes from which class of worship and then we might determine its width
1:02:21 · from knowing that okay a 10 is likely to have had two levels of five men per ore then you give
1:02:30 · one meter per man sitting on an ore you have so much space between ores
1:02:36 · and then you have again five meters represented by the men again on the other side of the ore then
1:02:43 · you have to have um so much space between the uh the man
1:02:48 · sitting next to the hull of the ship and the hull of the ship and that can give you sort of a general idea of
1:02:55 · what the dimension of the beam or the width of the ship could be at its maximum extent
1:03:00 · but as for getting some sort of magical idea of the overall dimensions of the ship
1:03:06 · unfortunately we can't do that yeah i think this sort of answers the
1:03:13 · next question the have any large ships been found from this era the answer to that is no large ships
1:03:20 · have not been found um from this era um we have a couple of incredibly large
1:03:27 · ships that were pleasure barges that were found in a lake in italy
1:03:32 · called nemi they were excavated back in the 1920s and um preserved inside a museum there
1:03:41 · and the sizes of the timbers from these ships which i believe were built under the reign of caligula
1:03:50 · are fantastic and it gives us an idea that these very very large warships
1:03:55 · are part of a tradition that we utilized in other places and at other times for
1:04:00 · different purposes in antiquity so if you're interested in taking a look at what a super large ship
1:04:08 · might be i would recommend googling the nemi warships and see what comes up and
1:04:14 · following the bibliography there do we have any sense of how long the
1:04:21 · monument was intact is there any evidence physical or literary about the fate of the rams
1:04:27 · were they melted down perhaps we do have a sense of how long the
1:04:32 · monument was intact it seems to have been actively in use up into the third century
1:04:39 · and then following that time period we get more examples of a kind of pedestrian
1:04:45 · kind of pottery there like cooking pots
1:04:51 · exactly when it goes out of views will be determined by the excavators
1:04:59 · we're working right now and have almost finished the manuscript for the first volume of
1:05:06 · the final publication of the excavations there and that will be published by the athens
1:05:12 · archaeological society hopefully within a year or two and uh i believe the latest evidence
1:05:20 · that we have is a coin and i think it's either late third or i think it's late third century um
1:05:28 · about the rams we know from a chance reference and i've forgotten the
1:05:34 · ancient source that two of the statues were taken away from the monument
1:05:41 · and set up in oh gee i don't know whether it was the hippodrome but they were set up somewhere in
1:05:48 · constantinople and um we know that there was a tax rebellion that occurred
1:05:54 · i believe in the 6th century a.d which means that if there was a tax rebellion certainly
1:06:00 · the rams and after the deconstruction of um pagan sites the rams from this
1:06:08 · monument which was a religious site the rams from this monument would have been melted
1:06:13 · down for their bronze by the sixth century so i imagine the monument is pretty defunct by the
1:06:20 · beginning of the fourth century and the rams were definitely um if we
1:06:26 · can tell from those three fragments that were found there i think that the fragments show evidence
1:06:32 · of being hit by uh a sledgehammer uh and being bent
1:06:37 · so i think the rims were pulled out of the wall and one of the ways to do that would have been to bring draft animals there
1:06:44 · hook up um a harness that would have then been wrapped around
1:06:50 · the front of the ram you drive the animal to the side it will crack
1:06:55 · the ram out of the wall then you attack it with uh sledgehammers break up the ram put it
1:07:01 · into uh sacks and then uh uh put the sax on pack animals and take them away what's
1:07:07 · interesting is that uh a fragment and it's it's about that big um maybe a little bit bigger
1:07:14 · like that uh that fragment uh fell down behind some blocks and and
1:07:20 · was lost uh and as the other fragments were smaller they were more like
1:07:25 · that in size so yes they were broken up and then melted down
1:07:30 · presumably by the time the monument went out of use and i would say
1:07:35 · uh that would be you know during the time period of what is it the edict of is it
1:07:42 · constantine or i i forget when the final edict comes that closes the sanctuaries in in greece and
1:07:50 · i think at that time then the monument could have been without fear of offending the gods um
1:07:55 · broken up have there been any architectural studies of the stresses caused by the
1:08:02 · weight of the mounted rams on the retaining wall um i i didn't make that clear the rams
1:08:08 · sat at bra at ground level so um there was a massive retaining wall that the rams
1:08:14 · were socketed into then there was a and it seems as if the the architects have argued about this um
1:08:22 · it seems as if after the first phase of the monument a secondary retaining wall was built
1:08:29 · beneath the ram terrace the rams themselves were
1:08:34 · set on foundation pads of sandstone and on the top of the
1:08:39 · foundation pad there was a oh maybe three
1:08:44 · inch thick slab of limestone that served as a capping block for that
1:08:50 · foundation and then socketed into the middle of that limestone slab
1:08:56 · there was a bronze bracket that came up around the um the ramming head
1:09:03 · of the warhead of the ram itself so each ram itself would have been its weight would have been supported by
1:09:10 · the terrace that was in front of it interesting question though because the monument itself
1:09:16 · if you look at my um reconstruction the the animation that i made the monument is terribly deformed and
1:09:23 · what happens is it it broke in uh an area off toward the southeast and as a result of it breaking
1:09:31 · the winter rains escaped down through that break in the monument
1:09:37 · and carried with it the soil of the monument and there was
1:09:42 · slumping that caused the monument to deform and sink into a hole there
1:09:50 · so um it wasn't the weight of the ram so much that caused that that did the
1:09:55 · monument in it was the entire weight of this massive concrete core that was set there
1:10:03 · and being put on a hillside that was um geologically unstable so that when
1:10:11 · there's a fair amount of water that comes in springs all around the monument which explains
1:10:17 · why octavian had his campsite there and contributed to the slumping of the earth
1:10:25 · apparently there is a layer of clay which is underneath the monument that facilitates this process
1:10:31 · of water oozing out in that general area and causing a soil creep downhill
1:10:39 · have there been attempts at underwater explorations in the area um because i didn't want to make the talk
1:10:47 · too long i took out a number of slides not too many like five
1:10:52 · slides i did attempt in 1993 and 1994 and 1997
1:11:00 · to do a survey of the sea floor because i became convinced by the monument that there were
1:11:07 · roughly 50 to 60 rams for which we cannot account and i believe that these
1:11:13 · 50 or 60 rams were lost in in the battle so i think they're lying on the sea floor
1:11:19 · off the previza peninsula so we went out there uh with a small boat towed behind it
1:11:27 · a side scan sonar found some interesting targets which are things you want to look at further
1:11:33 · brought in a rov or a remotely operated vehicle and found what i believe are four
1:11:41 · catapult balls uh they are three kilometers offshore we also found a very curiously shaped uh
1:11:49 · curved object that is not a ram but lord knows what it is maybe it's geological
1:11:55 · um and when we went back in 1997 after i raised the money to
1:12:00 · retrieve the objects and and check them with metal detectors uh it turns out that the greek ministry
1:12:07 · of transportation had been building a car tunnel from one side of cape actium to the previza
1:12:14 · peninsula to the north they had excavated a trench in the
1:12:19 · bottom of the actium straits and had taken all of that material and had been dumping it over the battle zone for
1:12:25 · three years so that when we got out to the area where the catapult balls were
1:12:31 · there was 15 to 20 centimeters or more of sludge on the bottom
1:12:36 · so that sort of put an end to my attempt to to look for battle debris but the folks
1:12:41 · that i'm working with in sicily they have the technology that would be required to
1:12:48 · check the area of actium and who knows maybe one day we can work out an arrangement
1:12:54 · with the department of underwater antiquities and um and check the area
1:13:02 · um and one last question um are there any implications for the course of the
1:13:07 · battle or its aftermath considering the difficulty slash impossibility um of recovering one
1:13:13 · of these giant rams once the enemy ship had been sunk
1:13:18 · um we generally believe that that once the battle was over and it was
1:13:24 · determined that you were victorious um the victors then went out and and
1:13:31 · poked through the wreckage of the the fleet that had been defeated they immediately poked through the wreckage
1:13:37 · of their own fleet and saved as many men as they possibly could they
1:13:42 · poked through the wreckage of the defeated fleet and if the ships were salvageable they
1:13:49 · um threw housers around them and dragged them back to shore um i think
1:13:55 · that some of the rams that were recovered were recovered from this process um as for the
1:14:02 · the ships that sank there's absolutely no way in which octavian would have been
1:14:08 · able to get his hands on them because it's hundreds of feet deep in the area where the battle zone is
1:14:15 · are there implications for the course of the battle or its aftermath considering the impossibility or
1:14:22 · difficulty of recovering one of these giant rams and i guess putting those two statements together i
1:14:27 · would say no i think the course of the battle or its
1:14:32 · aftermath we have to rely upon what the official sources tell us and what the
1:14:39 · official sources tell us is that the battle was concluded by fire which is one of the things you do
1:14:46 · if you don't want to get in close and risk your own men after you've defeated ships and and put
1:14:52 · them out of action one of the ways in which you can further defeat and render those ships uh harmless is by
1:15:00 · burning them and then it causes the men on board to jump into the water then you can kill
1:15:06 · them or rescue them as you see fit and it means that the ships themselves can't be utilized anymore um we're told
1:15:13 · that that was the conclusion of the battle and then after that we're told that octavian was so twitchy that i believe
1:15:21 · he remained aboard his ship i don't know maybe throughout the night
1:15:27 · because he was not it's sort of like the presidential election that we're going through now
1:15:33 · the the networks were so twitchy about calling one state or another that they
1:15:40 · were reluctant to do what i've seen done and done in many many other presidential elections and that be
1:15:46 · not quite so 99.5 certain that something was going to be
1:15:52 · so before they called it octavian was still uncertain about the result of this battle he's probably
1:15:57 · uncertain about what the troops of anthony were going to do so
1:16:03 · the implications for the course of the battle in its aftermath come largely from the historical
1:16:10 · accounts that seem to me to ring true that octavian didn't fully recognize the
1:16:17 · the magnitude of his victory until the next day um when he saw what what was left behind
1:16:25 · and um i don't think any of that information comes from what fell to the sea floor or what is
1:16:33 · represented up on the hill on that monument okay and i've got a couple more
1:16:39 · questions in one um quite technical um for the class 10
1:16:44 · galley you assume two ores with five rowers per or can we assume three oars with a four
1:16:50 · for two rowers or five three two rowers arrangement like soccer teams
1:16:55 · the answer to that is of course yes you can you can do that what happens when you've got
1:17:03 · two rowers on an ore uh that would make the the beam of the ship less if you had
1:17:08 · four four two if you have five three two i'm not sure that gets you much because you're still going
1:17:16 · to have the same width that five men on that on that upper ore is going to give you um when
1:17:24 · you create three levels of ores the problem is the ore that is highest out of the water
1:17:30 · and that's the five man ore is going to be a monstrous telephone like pole
1:17:35 · timber um and that's going to be hard to row hard to pull at the same pace as the
1:17:43 · two man or on the bottom that's why i believe uh for something like a 10 most uh um ship experts that i've talked
1:17:51 · to like the five by five because it means both ores are going to be the same weight and
1:17:57 · so the rate at which you pull them would be the same speed but the the the answer to
1:18:03 · the question is yes of course given our understanding of the way these ships are classed you can have these other combinations
1:18:11 · but the higher the more levels you make particularly when you've got multiple man ores
1:18:18 · it means you have to make the levels high if when you put more than two men per or in
1:18:24 · order to get the ore in the water this is to judge from evidence that comes from the venetian period
1:18:30 · um when you put more than three men per ore the men have to stand in order to put
1:18:37 · the war or in the water so if they stand it means that the rowing compartment has to
1:18:42 · be expanded in height and all of that raises the height of the ship and increases the weight of the ship and
1:18:49 · um i'm not an expert in ship construction so these are just the problems that i know
1:18:55 · when you start messing around with the ore system but the answer is yes you could have those other combinations
1:19:02 · i see a question here which says if you burn the ship can you recover the ram and um that's an interesting question
1:19:09 · and it depends on how the ship is burned and how far it burns as the ship burns
1:19:15 · then the timbers of the superstructure burn away and it becomes lighter and as the ship
1:19:21 · becomes lighter it rises out of the water and as more of the superstructure burns it becomes lighter and rises out of the
1:19:28 · water the warship rams are mounted on timbers that are at the waterline
1:19:36 · so that when you pile into an enemy ship the blow that you make is at the water
1:19:41 · line and it can cause a hole in the enemy ship that will emit sea water
1:19:48 · if the ship rises up out of the water then it means that the bow is going to rise out of the water and it means that
1:19:54 · if the fire continues and it gets incredibly like an oven inside a ship when it burns
1:20:00 · um there's because the ship is just held together with piles and piles of pitch so the pitch ignites you know what it's
1:20:08 · like when the forests around you catch fire after a drought the the trees explode um the same thing
1:20:15 · like this could happen inside a warship and then it would burn the ram free from the support timbers
1:20:20 · and it would drop off into the ocean so i think the answer is how quickly does
1:20:26 · the fire go out uh if the fire is allowed there was a study again done by j
1:20:32 · richard steffy of a ship at charleston called the charon and i believe
1:20:39 · it was um one of these battery ships that was um uh
1:20:46 · anchored anchored in the bay and utilized for cannon fire and as a result of that
1:20:52 · cannons that were shot from this ship it caught on fire and the ship burned to the water line and they
1:20:58 · continued to burn and continued to burn and continued to burn and he found i believe that 15
1:21:05 · of the hull structure was preserved of this ship so as it burned it rose and burned more
1:21:11 · and rose and burned more and rose until finally the pig iron ballast that
1:21:16 · it had in it and the cannon that were in it that hadn't already fallen out caused the ship to uh sink to
1:21:23 · the sea floor to overcome the natural buoyancy of the wood and sink to the seafloor
1:21:28 · excellent question if you burn the ship can you recover the ram
1:21:34 · so yeah you probably can't and anthony burned some of his ships on the beach so those
1:21:40 · those rams could be recovered and one last um question about
1:21:46 · comparing uh the action rostra to the rostra and the roman forum do we have any sense of the the
1:21:53 · comparandum of size if you really look into the evidence for
1:21:58 · the roman roster forum you'll find that there's nothing there like these carved sockets
1:22:06 · if you actually go look there's some dowel holes that are preserved um the best place to get a view of what
1:22:13 · the rostra would have looked like in the roman forum is to take a look at a sculpture called the plutayi triani
1:22:21 · which is on display inside the senate house so if you go in the senate house and you take a look at the marbles in there
1:22:28 · they have a panel that shows um graphically depicted the roman forum during the time period
1:22:35 · of hadrian i think it's the time period of hadrian and um on one end you've got the rams of the
1:22:43 · rostra rostra and then on the other end you've got the rams that are associated with the temple of the divine julius
1:22:50 · um and you can see them they're they're small things they're uh lifted up off the
1:22:55 · ground and um
1:23:03 · to my knowledge there are no blocks that survive that give us a real clear indication of
1:23:08 · how those things were mounted they must have been mounted like the rams at um
1:23:14 · the necopolis monument with actual honest-to-goodness sockets into which you could place these rams
1:23:21 · because they were suspended off the ground and we can see from those monuments and from coins that um
1:23:28 · the rams themselves appeared not to have little support struts underneath them holding them up we know
1:23:34 · that they're columns that had rams on them um
1:23:40 · and there are a couple of altars that you can find in the capitalized museum with little bitty rams on them
1:23:46 · and i think they're attempting to uh depict trireme rams so um do we have any size
1:23:53 · comparisons of the actium roster versus the rostra and the roman forum the answer is no
1:23:59 · but i believe from various kinds of evidence we can conclude that the roster the traditional old
1:24:06 · rostra in the roman forum meaning the rams on the monument called the rostra in the
1:24:11 · roman forum were probably trirem rams and as a result they were much smaller than the ones at
1:24:18 · actium and that's kind of cool because it shows that what octavian was doing at actium was
1:24:26 · he was building a hellenistic size monument that would not have been
1:24:34 · accepted well in rome because it would have gone against the norms of the republic and he
1:24:39 · was falling all over himself at this time period to say i am restoring the norms of the republic
1:24:48 · i am going to follow the norms of the republic whereas hundreds of miles away in
1:24:53 · western greece he builds this thing that makes it look like he's uh you know a successor of uh
1:25:00 · ptolemy ii different strokes for different folks you can get away with some things
1:25:06 · outside the capital and other things you cannot so there's an interesting story about
1:25:12 · the size comparisons between the realms of the roman roster and those at action
1:25:20 · thank you so much this has been really really really interesting um uh and if you guys want to unmute and
1:25:28 · give a round of applause that would be
1:25:38 · fabulous thank you for your quiet applause i like that
1:25:46 · thank you all right thank you thanks a lot bye bye thank you
1:25:54 · it was nice meeting you i i wish i wish you know i were there to the extent that we could you know go out to
1:26:00 · dinner or something like that this this would be nice to meet some of the people who are there and that's what we really miss from all
1:26:07 · of this i know and again you are welcome to hang out for a bit more if you would like to
1:26:12 · i'm sure um there will be a few people that will will hang on um but yeah that was just
1:26:20 · really really interesting i really liked it do you have any idea how long it went um well in terms of we're now at 229.
1:26:30 · so but the actual length of the lecture was of course significantly
1:26:36 · shorter because we did a number of questions i'll have to look i think it'll be in the recorded length so i can see you know as
1:26:43 · i say when i get carried away and add more details then it goes longer
1:26:50 · yeah again i thought it was great so um i was riveted well thank you very much
1:26:59 · yeah um lots of people are writing in thank yous so yeah and just to um sort of iterate what
1:27:06 · iceland is saying um i think that the it's such a riveting talk that even with the details uh you're
1:27:13 · you're holding onto people's attention so if you're worried about trying to sort of play with the link for giving the talk
1:27:19 · in other aia yeah places i think i think you can kind of get away with it because there's so many different components that are so
1:27:26 · cool about it so i appreciate that because i've been you know twiggling and twiddling
1:27:32 · with this thing for a week or so and um i can cut out more
1:27:38 · it's just if i can get away with it i'd rather not yeah no i i again i was not
1:27:46 · bored i was not bored in the least um and i just again you kept bringing in
1:27:52 · different elements and it was like oh that's cool oh that's really interesting um and even things like the map uh that
1:27:59 · you know on the floor that was the most fun graduate school project i think i've ever had it was so
1:28:07 · much fun it was filmed before we actually got it filmed by the discovery channel
1:28:14 · i don't think they ended up using any of the footage because the map itself had a glare to it so the video wasn't
1:28:21 · all that impressive but the process of doing it was just a heck of a lot of fun
1:28:28 · and really instructive i mean do you you don't get an idea of what a naval
1:28:33 · battle was like generally speaking i mean i've sat for days and days and hours and hours and
1:28:39 · hours and hours on those days out over the battle zone while we were looking for um things on the seafloor
1:28:47 · and painting in my mind's eye what the extent of the fleets would have been
1:28:53 · like but it was nothing like having this map and the cool part about it was it was scaled
1:28:58 · in such a way that as you i'm like five foot ten as i walked around across the surface of the
1:29:05 · map the height of my eyes was like um a mile off the surface of the
1:29:11 · land so it was as if you were in a small airplane flying around it was really cool
1:29:17 · it was a lot of fun it was so big and the map weighed so much because it was printed
1:29:22 · on this um vinyl-like stuff that we couldn't save
1:29:27 · it we had to throw the map out after it was done i think it cost him six thousand dollars to print it
1:29:33 · wow that's that's devotion yeah he really was into it
1:29:40 · well you know i'm not sure it cost him six thousand dollars but
1:29:47 · still pretty interesting okay well we're just doing the recording
1:29:53 · you still got it running okay all right well everybody
1:29:59 · i guess that's it i'll go have my glass of wine now yes let's see for me it's uh
1:30:06 · 5 30 so it's appropriate i can do that yeah yeah it's a little bit early for us [Laughter]
1:30:13 · if i was there probably wouldn't have stopped me from getting a beer or something it's true that's true yeah again i'm
1:30:20 · sorry we don't get to like celebrate with you but um yeah that was just great
1:30:26 · thank you everybody i enjoyed it too bye bye bye

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.