I just ordered William Murray - The Age of Titans: The Rise and Fall of the Great Hellenistic Navies. It's basically about the proliferation of very large ships in the fleets of the great eastern Greek monarchies that were created out of the ashes of Alexander's empire. The building block of fleets used to be the trireme (Greek triereis), a ship that had, for lack of a better description, three banks of rowers. The eastern kings, however, built progressively larger and more impressive ships: the pentereis, or "five" in slang (Roman quinquereme, the basis for one of Carthage/Qarthadast's UUs in Civ 5) was one of the most popular, but eventually they built "eights", "tens", and "fifteens".
The usual story is that the larger ships were basically useless white elephants. This is supposed to fit in with the general narrative of the Successor monarchies as decadent, inefficient, and foolish, wasting their money and men on pomp and circumstance and not using them on the real stuff of warfare, which is why the Romans supposedly beat them. Since other elements of that narrative have been demonstrably collapsed in recent years, I assume that Murray will be exploding at least parts of this myth, too. The book's gotten significant praise from most of the people that I know are better at Hellenistic history than I am, so that's a good sign.
I may produce an in-depth review later.
" - Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed.
