History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides. The history of the Peloponnesian War, Volume 1-2. Dale, Henry, translator. London: Heinemann and Henry G. Bohn, 1851-1852.

These were the strongest of their navies. But even these, though many generations after the Trojan war, appear to have used but few triremes, and to have been still fitted out with fifty-oared vessels, and long boats, as that fleet was.

And it was but a short time before the Median war, and the death of Darius, who was king of the Persians after Cambyses, that triremes were possessed in any number by the tyrants of Sicily and the Corcyraeans. For these were the last navies worth mentioning established in Greece before the expedition of Xerxes: