NĂTĀTĬO, NĂTĀTŌRĬUM. [[Balneum].]
NĀVĀLIA, docks at Rome where ships were built, laid up, and refitted. They were attached to the emporium outside of the Porta Trigemina, and were connected with the Tiber. The emporium and navalia were first included within the walls of the city by Aurelian.—The docks (νεώσοικοι or νεώρια) in the Peiraeeus at Athens cost 1000 talents, and having been destroyed in the anarchy were again restored and finally completed by Lycurgus, the contemporary of Demosthenes. They were under the superintendence of regular officers, called ἐπιμεληταὶ τῶν νεωρίων.
NĀVĀLIS CŎRŌNA. [[Corona].]
NĀVARCHUS (ναύαρχος), the name by which the Greeks designated both the captain of a single ship, and the admiral of a fleet. The office itself was called ναυαρχία. The admiral of the Athenian fleet was always one of the ten generals (στρατηγοί) elected every year, and he had either the whole or the chief command of the fleet. The chief officers who served under him were the trierarchs and the pentecontarchs, each of whom commanded one vessel; the inferior officers in the vessels were the κυβερνῆται or helmsmen, the κελευσταί or commanders of the rowers, and the πρωρᾶται, who must have been employed at the prow of the vessels. Other Greek states who kept a navy had likewise their navarchs. The chief admiral of the Spartan fleet was called navarchus, and the second in command epistoleus (ἐπιστολεύς). The same person was not allowed to hold the office of navarchus two successive years at Sparta. [[Epistoleus].]
NAUCRĀRĬA (ναυκραρία), the name of a division of the inhabitants of Attica. The four ancient phylae were each divided into three phratries, and each of these twelve phratries into four naucraries, of which there were thus forty-eight. What the naucraries were previous to the legislation of Solon is not stated anywhere, but it is not improbable that they were political divisions similar to the demes in the constitution of Cleisthenes, and were made perhaps at the time of the institution of the nine archons, for the purpose of regulating the liturgies, taxes, or financial and military affairs in general. At any rate, however, the naucraries before the time of Solon can have had no connection with the navy, for the Athenians then had no navy; the word ναύκραρος therefore cannot be derived from ναῦς, ship, but must come from ναιω, and ναύκραρος is thus only another form for ναύκληρος in the sense of a householder, as ναῦλον was used for the rent of a house. Solon in his legislation retained the old institution of the naucraries, and charged each of them with the equipment of one trireme and with the mounting of two horsemen. All military affairs, as far as regards the defraying of expenses, probably continued as before to be regulated according to naucraries. Cleisthenes, in his change of the Solonian constitution, retained the division into naucraries for military and financial purposes; but he increased their number to fifty, making five for each of his ten tribes; so that now the number of their ships was increased from forty-eight to fifty, and that of horsemen from ninety-six to one hundred. The statement of Herodotus, that the Athenians in their war against Aegina had only fifty ships of their own, is thus perfectly in accordance with the fifty naucraries of Cleisthenes. The functions of the former ναύκραροι, or the heads of their respective naucraries, were now transferred to the demarchs. [[Demarchi].] The obligation of each naucrary to equip a ship of war for the service of the republic may be regarded as the first form of trierarchy. As the system of trierarchy became developed and established, this obligation of the naucraries appears to have gradually ceased, and to have fallen into disuse. [[Trierarchia].]
NAUCRĀRUS. [[Naucraria].]
NĀVIS, NĀVĬGIUM (ναῦς, πλοῖον), a ship. The numerous fleet, with which the Greeks are said to have sailed to the coast of Asia Minor, must on the whole be regarded as sufficient evidence of the extent to which navigation was carried on in those times, however much of the detail in the Homeric description may have arisen from the poet’s own imagination. In the Homeric catalogue it is stated that each of the fifty Boeotian ships carried 120 warriors, and a ship which carried so many cannot have been of very small dimensions. What Homer states of the Boeotian vessels applies more or less to the ships of other Greeks. These boats were provided with a mast (ἱστός) which was fastened by two ropes (πρότονοι) to the two ends of the ship, so that when the rope connecting it with the prow broke, the mast would fall towards the stern, where it might kill the helmsman. The mast could be erected or taken down as necessity required. They also had sails (ἱστία), but no deck; each vessel however appears to have had only one sail, which was used in favourable winds; and the principal means of propelling the vessel lay in the rowers, who sat upon benches (κληΐδες). The oars were fastened to the side of the ship with leathern thongs (τροποὶ δερμάτινοι), in which they were turned as a key in its hole. The ships in Homer are mostly called black (μέλαιναι), probably because they were painted or covered with a black substance, such as pitch, to protect the wood against the influence of the water and the air; sometimes other colours, such as μίλτος, minium (a red colour), were used to adorn the sides of the ships near the prow, whence Homer occasionally calls ships μιλτοπάρῃοι, i.e. red-cheeked; they were also painted occasionally with a purple colour (φοινικοπάρῃοι). When the Greeks had landed on the coast of Troy, the ships were drawn on land, and fastened at the poop to large stones with a rope which served as anchors. The Greeks then surrounded the fleet with a fortification to secure it against the attacks of the enemy. This custom of drawing the ships upon the shore, when they were not used, was followed in later times also, as every one will remember from the accounts in Caesar’s Commentaries. In the Odyssey (v. 243, &c.) the building of a boat (σχεδία) is described, though not with the minuteness which an actual ship-builder might wish for. Ulysses first cuts down with his axe twenty trees, and prepares the wood for his purpose by cutting it smooth and giving it the proper shape. He then bores the holes for nails and hooks, and fits the planks together and fastens them with nails. He rounds the bottom of the ship like that of a broad transport vessel, and raises the bulwark (ἴκρια), fitting it upon the numerous ribs of the ship. He afterwards covers the whole of the outside with planks, which are laid across the ribs from the keel upwards to the bulwark: next the mast is made, and the sail-yard attached to it, and lastly the rudder. When the ship is thus far completed, he raises the bulwark still higher by a wicker-work which goes all around the vessel, as a protection against the waves. This raised bulwark of wicker-work and the like was used in later times also. For ballast Ulysses throws into the ship ὕλη, which according to the Scholiast consisted of wood, stones, and sand. Calypso then brings him materials to make a sail of, and he fastens the ὑπέραι or ropes which run from the top of the mast to the two ends of the yard, and also the κάλοι with which the sail is drawn up or let down. The πόδες mentioned in this passage were undoubtedly, as in the later times, the ropes attached to the two lower corners of the square sail. The ship of which the building is thus described was a small boat, a σχεδία, as Homer calls it; but it had like all the Homeric ships a round or flat bottom. Greater ships must have been of a more complicated structure, as ship-builders are praised as artists. Below ([p. 266]), a representation of two boats is given which appear to bear great resemblance to the one of which the building is described in the Odyssey.—The Corinthians were the first who brought the art of ship-building nearest to the point at which we find it in the time of Thucydides, and they were the first who introduced ships with three ranks of rowers (τριήρεις, Triremes). About B.C. 700, Ameinocles the Corinthian, to whom this invention is ascribed, made the Samians acquainted with it; but it must have been preceded by that of the Biremes, that is, ships with two ranks of rowers, which Pliny attributes to the Erythraeans.[3] These innovations however do not seem to have been generally adopted for a long time; for we read that about the time of Cyrus the Phocaeans introduced long sharp-keeled ships called πεντηκόντοροι. These belonged to the class of long war-ships (νῆες μακραί), and had fifty rowers, twenty-five on each side of the ship, who sat in one row. It is further stated that before this time vessels called στρογγύλαι, with large round or rather flat bottoms, had been used exclusively by all the Ionians in Asia. At this period most Greeks seem to have adopted the long ships with only one rank of rowers on each side (Moneris).
Moneris. (Montfaucon, vol. IV. pt. II. pl. 142.)
Their name varied accordingly as they had fifty (πεντηκόντοροι), or thirty (τριακόντοροι), or even a smaller number of rowers. A ship of war of this class is represented in the preceding woodcut. The following cut contains a beautiful fragment of a Biremis with a complete deck. Another specimen of a small Biremis is given further on.—