ABSTRACT
The speech Against Euergos and Mnesiboulos describes a dispute over some naval gear. For the navy, however, there is no trace of symmories before the 350s, and everyone agrees that it was the law of Periandros which introduced the use of symmories for maintaining ships, which had previously been the sole responsibility of one trierarch or a pair of syntrierarchs for each ship. A further argument in favour of the view that trierarchs are to be distinguished from contributors may be drawn from the law about exemption from liturgies. Ruschenbusch too considers that the men who served as trierarchs were less numerous than the 1200 payers of eisphora. So the failure of the orators to draw the distinction between eisphora symmories and naval symmories cannot be satisfactorily explained by saying that the meaning is always clear from the context; it is more easily explained by saying that the distinction did not exist.
