The Roman warship we are interested in is called a "quinquereme." You may notice it sounds a bit like, "trireme." That is because it is similar in design to the trireme. During the first Punic war the Romans were forced to build a fleet to fight Carthage so they copied the Greek/Carthaginian ship design. The name is derived from the number of rowers. A trireme had rows of three rowers where the quinquereme had rows of five rowers, presumably working three oars, two on two oars and one on one oar. 

Length	45 meters
Height	6.5 meters
Beam	5 meters
Density	0.58x10^3 kilograms per cubic meter
Crew	420 people
Ballast	????
Sails	????

    The Roman quinqueremes were heavier than their Carthaginian counterparts being constructed from cedar of Lebanon and were said to sit at about 3 meters above the water. Polybius also says that of the 400 man crew, 300 were rowers and 100 or more were marines. Assuming 150 rowers on each side and given our supposed seating arrangement they would have had 30 oars on each side of the boat.

    We can guess based on ancient imagery depicting the Roman warships that the quinquereme had two sails, one in the front at an angle and one taller main sail. What their heights were though we can only guess. We are also left to guessing when it comes to the ballast used by the Roman navy.

    With what we have we can obtain an approximation of the volume and weight of the body of the Roman vessel.



    So now we have an appoximation of the mass and volume of the craft, 163,244.33 kg. By going to www.bluebulbprojects.com going to "Measure of Things", and typing in our result we see that that is about the mass of a house so this seems reasonable. Assuming that the average mass of a full grown man is about 70 kilograms we can begin to make some estimates of the total mass of a quinquereme with a crew of the size given to us by Polybius.

	w/o Crew	With Crew
Volume	281.46 m^3	???
Mass	163,244.33 kg/m^3	192,644.33 kg/m^3
Weight	192,644.33 N	1,887,914.443 N