The Roman business is silly. The legions routinely set up stockaded camps every night, a job that required several hours. If you look at Cyrus's marching rates

The Roman business is silly. The legions routinely set up stockaded camps every night, a job that required several hours. If you look at Cyrus's marching rates in The Anabasis, generally his troops (contemporary with the early republican legions) made a bit under 20 miles per day, making camps that weren't fortified. The legions may have managed the occasional 40-mile forced march, but so have infantries much more recently.The USMC at one point made a fetish of the 50-mile hike. I suspect the Athenian business is silly. Our information about the building and operation of the triremes is quite sketchy, or was within the last ten to fifteen years. As I recall the Tutsis had a step up before the bar, from which they jumped. What the mechanical advantage of that might be, I don't know. I'm tired of this nonsense, probably because I'm a modern wimp--australopithecus surely had a higher tolerance for pseudo-scientific nonsense.