A fragmentary stele depicting an ancient warship with a three-bladed waterline ram at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, # 1987.297. Nice to finally see this one in person!

Four years ago today! Nearly 100°F, not a cloud in the sky, and I spent the day searching all over Ostia for this stone ram. Of course, it turned out to be tucked away in a back corner. This was during the AAR Classical Summer School, and it was definitely worth the hunt.

Proof day! 🏺⚔️🌊 Just received the proofs for my upcoming chapter on Odysseus and the Sirens. It explores how ancient artists adapted the myth to reflect the naval warfare of their time, helping us understand the development of bronze warship rams. Almost perfect timing for Nolan’s The Odyssey!

Yay! Just accepted in IJNA! ⚔️ 🌊 I argue that Murray (2001/2002) was right that the ram is small and likely belongs to a trireme, but that its design is better understood through the Cimmerian Bosporus rather than the Ptolemaic or wider Mediterranean world.

What’s your favorite day in the field doing archaeology? Mine goes back to the Egadi Islands survey work for RPM Nautical. It was my first time out there and planning/picking the underwater targets for the day. I went with this small shadow on the sonar, well away from the main cluster of rams.

This week in naval rams in popular culture! First: Rick and Morty goes with a kind of three-bladed waterline ram on a single level galley, reads Egyptian/Levant inspired in overall shape and iconography, but pushed hard into sci-fi exaggeration. No ramming though! 6/10.

🚨 THIS WEEK TO PATREON AND APPLE 🚨 ⚓ Rome started as a regional power and became a maritime powerhouse. Dr Stephen DeCasien explains how that transformation happened. 🎧 Listen now: www.patreon.com/hist... #HistoryRage #RomanNavy #AncientRome #HistoryPodcast 🌊

🚨 NEXT WEEK FOR SUBSCRIBERS🚨 Think ancient Rome was just about legions on land? 🏛️❌ @sdecasien.bsky.social is here to prove Rome was a massive naval powerhouse! 🌊⚓ From epic shipwrecks to brutal bronze rams, get ready to shatter the ultimate landlubber myth. #History #AncientRome

The largest bronze fragment recovered near the rostral wall of the Actian Victory Monument. Among the few surviving relics of the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), it may have originated from one of the massive warships that served in the fleets of Antony and Cleopatra.

Originally published online in December 2025, this article is now available in print in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. For fellow enthusiasts of naval rams 🌊 🐏

Grad school story: I had a professor who graded exams competitively against the class. It initially seemed like an interesting approach, but I eventually came to hate it.

I am always skeptical of Plutarch’s treatment of Actium. He dismisses what would have been a fairly conventional opening exchange of ramming attacks and then immediately adopts the victor’s preferred framing of the battle: Agrippa’s agile fleet defeating Antony’s massive but ineffective warships.

I really wonder what the ram cakes looked like….semi-related cake a colleague made for me a few years ago!

Stephen DeCasien, Ph.D.@sdecasien.bsky.social · 3mo ago

2. A joke about too much wine exciting some men’s “naval rams,” part of a broader Greek and Roman tradition of using the ram as a phallic joke. 3. A reference to breads/cakes baked in the shape of trireme rams.

There are only three times Athenaeus uses the Greek word embolos in reference to a naval ram: 1. The seven rams of the tessarakonteres (which, in my opinion, is as ridiculous as the ship itself).

Herodotus is a particularly interesting author for studying ancient naval rams and ramming warfare. He is one of the few surviving authors to preserve evidence for more than one ram design.

Messing with the numbers again: the 5 “ten”-sized rams produced for the Battle of Actium in 31 consumed an amount of bronze equal to roughly 33% of all the bronze used by a 200-ship Roman fleet at the Battle of the Egadi Islands in 241. If we can trust our reconstructions…which is always a big if. 😅

Stephen DeCasien, Ph.D.@sdecasien.bsky.social · 3mo ago

You have to give serious credit to Octavian and Marcus Agrippa’s naval forces at the Battle of Actium for not panicking when they saw the size and scale of the ships Mark Antony and Cleopatra brought. Visit the Actian Victory Monument and you understand it immediately.

⚓ HUGE thanks to @sdecasien.bsky.social for raging with me that Rome was a NAVAL power, not just a land empire! 🏛️🌊 We explored Roman sea control, naval warfare, and the archaeology proving Rome’s maritime might. Coming 22nd Jun www.patreon.com/historyrage #HistoryRage #AncientRome #NavalHistory

This is great! Also, how to support an academic: - read their papers - cite their articles and books - tell your friends and students about their work - include their work in your reading lists and syllabi - ask your library to buy their books - tell them you liked their work or that it was helpful

Avonna Loves Genres@agkersh123.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Someone over on X confidently claimed that certain ships never existed because we haven’t found any wrecks, and “every fleet in history has shipwrecks.” Well… welcome to antiquity, I guess. By that standard, we can go ahead and erase most ancient navies from existence.

“For when a ship was overtaken by several triremes and struck from all sides by their bronze rams, as the water rushed in, it would be swallowed by the sea with all its crew.” - Diod. Sic. 13.16.3

Paperback of my book on the Polis is now out. Link in next post.

You have to give serious credit to Octavian and Marcus Agrippa’s naval forces at the Battle of Actium for not panicking when they saw the size and scale of the ships Mark Antony and Cleopatra brought. Visit the Actian Victory Monument and you understand it immediately.

I love the Olympias trireme, but it still bothers me that they used the Athlit ram design. Even the publication admits the mismatch. Still, it was an ambitious experimental project and some compromises were inevitable. Maybe time for a quinquereme build next with an Egadi ram?

Naval blockades in antiquity rarely seem to be carried out solely by naval forces; most have some form of land-based pressure. The closest case I can think of is the Siege of Tyre, though even there the mole proved decisive. Can anyone think of a successful example carried out by naval forces alone?

We can only guess what happened to the Punic ships after the Battle of the Egadi Islands (241 BCE). Sources vary wildly on how many were destroyed, captured, or recovered. Some were likely reused, others stripped, plenty just lost. What’s striking is the silence on the rams.

Out of all the Punic Wars, the First is the best because… lots of warships… and lots of rams…

Ancient History 101 Podcast@ancienthistory101.org · 4mo ago

New on the show today! The First Punic War: pirates, sieges, shipwrecks in storms and sacred, seasick chickens - PLUS the largest naval battle *in all of recorded history* - to guide us through this fascinating conflict is military historian extraordinaire @bretdevereaux.bsky.social

Philo Mechanicus would love this thread…he was a sucker for naval blockade talking points.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This is actually the normal and legal functioning of a blockade. Blockading ships can order ships running the blockade to stop for inspection - a ship that refuses to stop can be fired upon to make it stop. Ships with contraband or running the blockade can be seized.

My sister’s new article in Science!!! Congrats 🎉 @coevolvinglab.bsky.social Sex effects on gene expression across the human cerebral cortex at cell type resolution | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sex effects on gene expression across the human cerebral cortex at cell type resolution

Sex differences in neurodevelopmental, psychiatric, and neurodegenerative disease susceptibility may arise from sex chromosome and hormonal influences on cell type–specific gene expression. We present...

science.org

Got a chance between teaching classes to explore the historic shipyard where China’s first aircraft carrier (the Liaoning) was commissioned. The story behind it is honestly wild. This place once produced a significant number of Chinese naval vessels (also the Shandong aircraft carrier).

“If you should chance to have a naval force that is slightly inferior to that of the enemy, take on your fighting decks your best and most experienced soldiers. Order them neither to climb out, nor to board any enemy ship, but to use the bronze ram.” – Philo Polior. D.103 [104.9].