Military naval language in Classical Athens (I). Hauling and launching ships: ἀνέλκω, καθέλκω and related terms

This article explores the development of military naval technical language in Classical Athens through a diachronic study of the verbs ἀνέλκω and νεωλκέω ‘to haul up onto dry land’ and καθέλκω ‘to launch into the sea’. Drawing from both literary and documentary texts, it argues that lexical specialisation responded to the technological and administrative consolidation of the Athenian dockyards. While Archaic poetry employs general motion verbs such as ἕλκω and ἐρύω with explicit path complements, the Classical period sees the semantic narrowing of ἀνέλκω and the emergence of καθέλκω as specialised terms for hauling warships into the shipsheds and launching them into the sea. These verbs display clear signs of technicalisation: referential restriction to triremes, compression of directional complements within a shared procedural framework, preference for telic aspectual forms, and progressive morphological restructuring. In the Hellenistic period, νεωλκέω further codifies the operation by incorporating the institutional domain of the dockyard into the verb itself. The study shows how the language of the Athenian navy both reflects and contributes to the stabilisation of technical knowledge within a defined community of practice centered on the Piraeus.