Dan Snow's History Hit - Archimedes and the Siege of Syracuse

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

Dan tells the story of Archimedes, the ancient Greek inventor whose weapons of war protected the town of Syracuse from a Roman army. The Romans laid siege to Syracuse between 213 and 212 BC, attacking by sea and land, but were repelled by the city's defences. The story goes that these included fantastical devices like the Claw of Archimedes, and a 'Death Ray' that would set ships ablaze. Eventually the stalemate broke and the Romans captured the city, but Archimedes' name would survive through the centuries.So who exactly was Archimedes? Can we believe these tall tales of ancient invention? And why did this siege happen anyway? Dan traces the course of Archimedes' life against the backdrop of the Punic Wars to answer these questions, and more.Produced by Dan Snow and edited by Dougal Patmore.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!

Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was one of the hardest fought sieges against the backdrop of one of the Roman world's greatest and most terrible wars. The siege of Syracuse in 212 BC. It was just one terrible chapter in a war that was raging across the eastern Mediterranean, fought by the two regional superpowers of the day, Carthage and Rome. The fighting ebbed and flowed at one point. A Carthaginian force was threatening Rome itself. Later,

A Carthaginian force was threatening Rome itself. Later, Rome would threaten Carthage. It was fought in the High Alps, in the islands of the Mediterranean, North Africa, Italy and the high seas. It was a war that would forge the reputations of some of history's greatest commanders. Hannibal, Rome's deadliest foe. Scipio Africanus, the man who eventually defeated him, and one of my favourite historical cognomens, Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, the Delayer. That is the Second Punic War, but today I'm talking about just one small but bloody and fascinating part of it, the siege. A notable moment in the war, because it showcased the engineering marvels

produced by one of history's greatest brains. A man called Archimedes. Who was Archimedes? And what exactly did he build? Can we believe the tall tales of subsequent historians? Did he build a death ray which reflected the power of the sun and allowed him to incinerate wooden ships out at sea? Well, stay tuned. You may have twigged by now this episode is inspired by the rather unexpected appearance of the siege and Archimedes in the recent Indiana Jones film.

I won't spoil it, but it gets pretty wild. So here's everything you need to know about Archimedes, Rome, and the siege of Syracuse. Enjoy. is first in blank unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. The mighty struggle between Carthage and Rome, known as the Second Punic War, lasted from 218 BC

to 201. 17 years. And folks, this was just the second of three terrible wars fought between Carthage and Rome for dominance in the Western Mediterranean in the 3rd and early 2nd century BC. The Second Punic War is the most famous, the most remembered, perhaps the most dramatic chapter in this massive struggle for domination. Carthage was older than Rome. Carthage

had been a Phoenician colony. People from what is now Lebanon had sailed out there and founded Carthage in perhaps the 9th century BC. It was situated very cleverly on Cap Bon, modern day Tunis, which dominates the very narrow point between North Africa and Malta and Sicily. It's the very narrow point between North Africa and Malta and Sicily. It's a bottleneck through which all the trade of the Mediterranean must pass. Carthage had ended up controlling an empire right along the coast of North Africa into southern Spain, the Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica, that sort of thing. And so as Rome had expanded through Italy and started looking out beyond Italy, Carthage was an obvious adversary. In 264 BC, the Romans and the Carthaginians had clash,

and the primary battlefield was the island of Sicily. Small city-states on Sicily had both appealed to two imperial powers to help, that old story of great power rivalry and war. Small players ask for help, dragging in big allies, the big imperial powers, and eventually they go at it. That war, the First Punic War, lasted almost two decades. Both sides won and lost huge battles, they lost mighty fleets they rebuilt them and then finally limped to the peace table in 241 BC Carthage had been defeated and they acknowledge the Roman sphere of influence Roman sort of control and domination over Sicily Sardinia Corsica and they had to pay a huge indemnity as well now on the island of Sicily, the city of Syracuse in southeast Sicily remained technically

independent, but transferred from being a client state of Carthage to a client of Rome. This war, the First Punic War, was long and terrible, but it was not the end of the matter. It was, perhaps, the end of the beginning. In both Rome, but especially in defeated Carthage, the politics had been radicalised. Leaders were driven to see the other as an existential threat. And there was a sense in many quarters that there could be no peace in the Mediterranean with both of these two powers rubbing up against each other, the Mediterranean, with both of these two powers rubbing up against each other, occupying adjacent zones of influence. In Carthage, that message was very much broadcast by the Barca family. They'd long been members of the ruling class. Hamilcar Barca was the general, so general in charge of Carthaginian forces in the First Punic War. He was, uns unsurprisingly an undying enemy of Rome. And he now headed out to

Spain to make up for imperial losses, to carve out an empire for himself and Carthage, possibly in that order, with various family members. Among them, his son-in-law Hasdrubal and his son, a young man called Hannibal. Few figures in the ancient world have attracted more myth-making than Hannibal, and one of the earliest ones says that his father, Hamilcar, forced him to swear an oath that he would use fire and steel to arrest the March of Rome. And actually, I think that's pretty believable. I've got no particular axe to grind in life but there have been moments of high emotion when I think I might have ordered my daughter to swear an oath that she'll use fire and steel to arrest the rise of some fleeting concern that I've had

at the time and I'm sure many of you have forced your children to swear similar oaths. Now the Barca family went on a campaign of conquest in Spain a very effective ones and they exploited the silver mines of the mountains of Sierra Morena there was silver in them hills and actually it's fascinating this little piece of history a bit of resonance here because just as the Spanish empire in South America grew by exploiting the amazing silver mines of the west this new continent so the Carthaginian empire exploited the Spanish silver mines to its west. Instead of shipping silver to Carthage, restoring Carthaginian finances, building up a great war chest for the Barca family, and paying off some of that indemnity to Rome. Hamilcar died, we think it was in a river crossing. Hasdrubal, his son-in-law, took over, but eight years later, in 221 BC,

he was assassinated and Hannibal took over. He was 25 years old and he'd been brought up in the army, campaigning. He was used to sleeping under canvas. Hannibal continued to push Carthaginian influence ever further into Iberia, And eventually Rome became alarmed. They issued some warnings and Hannibal ignored them. He sacked, destroyed, savagely captured a Roman client city, an allied city in northern Spain, and Rome declared war. It was 2-1-8 and the second great spasm of Romano-Carthaginian fighting was about to begin. Now this time, Rome might have started preparing its men and ships for amphibious operation to the south, but in a thunderbolt, in one of the most celebrated and shocking moves in the whole of military history,

Hannibal, well, you know what he did. He struck at Italy itself by marching across the Alps. 80,000 men and dozens of war elephants headed across the Pyrenees, across southern France, and into the high Alps. And he left in autumn. He had to fight various tribes and peoples along the way. And as a result, 54,000 men were lost in that momentous march. Some left behind as garrisons, some killed, some wounded, others died of exposure. But only 26,000 men arrived in northern Italy. Some of the elephants survived, including one which we know the name of, called the Syrian. It had apparently prosthetic tusks, a metal tusk. Some of the elephants survived, including one which we know the name of, called the Syrian,

which had apparently prosthetic tusks, a metal tusk. And with that small force, he went about inflicting some of the most famous defeats on the Romans in their history, establishing himself almost instantly as a military genius. In 217 BC, he smashed the Romans at Lake Trasimene. The year after, he inflicted what's often described as Rome's greatest defeat at Cannae, where he encircled a Roman army and killed 70,000 Romans in a day. Now, a little sidetrack here. Was it Rome's greatest ever defeat? Probably not, because the Roman Empire in the West was eventually overrun and Rome itself captured. And Cannae is often held up as an example of a very complete defeat, but one that did not have the strategic outcome that the victor had been hoping

for. It did not lead to Carthaginian victory in the Second Punic War. It did, however, loosen Rome's grip on its possessions in Italy. Some Italian provinces conquered by Rome now switched their allegiance to Hannibal, and it had an effect in Sicily as well. Prior to Hannibal's rampage on the Italian peninsula, Sicily had been Roman, captured after that first Punic War. In particular, Syracuse, that city I mentioned, was run by an old tyrant called Hyrule II. And for 45 years, this old man now, Hyrule II, has ruled over Syracuse and remained a staunch Roman client. But he died in 215 BC, around the time that Hannibal was loosening Rome's grip on this entire area.

And he was succeeded by Hieronymus, who thought there might now be a little bit more of a buyer's market when shopping around for imperial overlords. Hannibal negotiated a treaty with him, saying that if Syracuse switched to a kind of pro-Carthaginian posture, he would capture the rest of Sicily and deliver it into Syracusan hands. So Hieromius could carve out a little empire for himself as the two great superpowers fought. So Syracuse flipped to Carthage. The Romans would be forced to send an expeditionary force. And so in the spring of 213 BC, when Rome had plenty of other fires to put out in Italy, it sent an expeditionary force south to Sicily, men and ships, commanded by a man who

thankfully had missed the destruction at Cannae, one of Rome's greatest soldiers, Marcus Claudius Marcellus. Now, in recording this podcast, I've been looking back at some of my old classical historians, my old paperbacks I haven't had out for a few years. Plutarch writes a lot about this. Unfortunately, he's probably the least reliable. He's writing quite a long time after this, and historians aren't a big fan of Plutarch as a historian, but he's one of the few sources we've got to go on. Livy was also writing about this in the first century BC, and Polybius, who I'm trying to lean on more than any other, wrote about this episode in the first century BC. And Polybius, who I'm trying to lean on more than any other, wrote about this episode in the second century BC. Polybius was born around the time of the events that I'm describing. So he's writing history about events that occurred just before

around the time of his birth. So he's thought to be the most reliable. But let's start with Plutarch talking about Marcellus, because he's got a couple of interesting anecdotes. Marcellus is a nickname, a cognomen, taken on by several members of that family. It just means marshal. And young Marcellus was as marshal as his forebears. He was, Plutarch tells us, by experience a man of war,

of a sturdy body and a vigorous arm. He was naturally fond of war, and in its conflict displayed great impetuosity and high temper. But otherwise, he was modest, humane, and so far a lover of Greek learning and discipline as to honour and admire those who excelled therein, although he himself was prevented by his occupations from achieving a knowledge and proficiency here which corresponded to his desires.

That, friends, is very relatable. I'd love to be a linguist, I'd love to play the piano and guitar, I'd love to do lots of things, but I feel that I've been prevented by my occupations from achieving a proficiency here which corresponds to my desires. What a great turn of phrase. He was apparently, am I quoting, efficient and practised in every kind of fighting, but in single combat he surpassed himself, never declining a challenge and always killing his challengers. In Sicily, he saved his brother from the peril of his life,

covering him with his shield and killing those who were setting upon him. Marcellus had made a name for himself as a young man fighting the Gauls in what is now southern France. There's a particular story that Plutarch tells us. As he surveyed the ranks of the enemy, he saw what's described as the most beautiful armour, and friends and listeners, he decided to get his hands on it. Plutarch says,

He therefore rushed upon the man, and by a thrust of his spear which pierced his adversary's breastplate, and by the impact of his force in full career, threw him still living upon the ground, where with a second and third blow he promptly killed him. He scooped up the armour, no, I got it repaired, and the Senate decreed a triumph for Marcellus. This is one of the highest honours that can be bequeathed to a Roman citizen.

Marcellus's triumph apparently was seldom equaled in its splendour and wealth and spoils and captives of gigantic size, but besides this the most agreeable and the rarest spectacle of all was afforded when Marcellus himself carried to the god the armour of the barbarian king. So Rome, demonstrating a rugged and important meritocracy, sent Marcellus to Sicily with the fleet. Now Syracuse was once one of the most powerful cities in the Mediterranean. It's incredibly well placed. It was founded by Greeks. It's effectively a Greek-speaking, it's part of the most powerful cities in the Mediterranean. It's incredibly well placed. It was founded by Greeks.

It's effectively a Greek speaking. It's part of the Greek world. And the nucleus city is on a small island. There are great natural defences. There are cliffs. There is high ground. And these were improved with massive walls. There have been a lot of sieges of Syracuse.

Many of you will be thinking about the appalling Athenian moment of hubris when Alcibiades, the charismatic, beautiful, rather dangerous Athenian commander, persuaded the Athenians to go and capture Syracuse during Athens' mighty war with Sparta. And Sparta sent help to the Syracusans, and the Athenian expedition was annihilated. Survivors had to work in salt mines with their teeth smashed out by children on school holidays. It was a turning point in the Peloponnesian War. Syracuse had been fought over during the First Punic War, and it was now about to experience another gruelling, savage siege. Plutarch tells us that Marcellus had been appointed consul,

the highest magistracy in Rome, for the third time, sailed to Sicily. And Plutarch says for Hannibal's successes in the war had encouraged the Carthaginians to attempt anew the conquest of the island. And Plutarch tells us that he arrived, he encamped nearby, and he proceeded to attack the city by land and sea. He himself, having a fleet of 60 quinqueremes, now that, folks, is a five-banked rowing vessel. So a vessel with five banks of oars, one on top of each other. That is an astonishingly powerful vessel, an evolution of the Greek type of triremes, which people may have heard of. We have three banks of oars. This is a quinquereme. They're filled, Plutarch tells us, with all sorts of arms and missiles. And moreover, he'd erected an engine of artillery on

a huge platform, supported by eight galleys fastened together. And with this sailed up to the city wall, confidently relying on the extent and splendour of his equipment and his own great fame. So Marcellus has brought overwhelming force to bear. He's brought men, he's brought ships, he's lashed ships together to make massive artillery pieces, and perhaps, just as importantly, he's brought his own reputation. I am Marcellus. You may wish to surrender. Unfortunately for Marcellus, Syracuse's defenders could also count on a man with a remarkable reputation, a very different reputation, a reputation won in the laboratories, in the schoolhouses, not on the battlefield, but one that would prove just as effective. historian Livy says, there's an undertaking begun with so vigorous an assault that would have met with success if one man had not been at Syracuse at that time. That man was one of the most remarkable mathematicians and engineers of all time. His name was Archimedes.

Livy tells us that Archimedes was an unrivaled observer of the heavens and the stars. More remarkable, however, as an inventor and a contriver of artillery and engines of war, by which with the least pains he frustrated whatever the enemy undertook with vast efforts. Who was this man? Well, the annoying news is we know almost nothing at all. We think his father was an astronomer called Pheidias. We think we know that Archimedes was born and raised in Syracuse. He left eight or nine scientific mathematical papers, but some of these may have been ascribed to him later, and they've survived through Arabic translations and Greek copies. Nearly everything else is hearsay, myth. We have Polybius, who was writing only a few decades after the siege,

decades after Archimedes, so hopefully we can trust some of the detail in there. So Archimedes is growing up in this Greek city in Sicily. He's Greek-speaking, he's Greek-writing. There's no evidence he ever went to Greece itself, but we can be fairly confident he went to Alexandria. And we know that he was in correspondence with people who lived in Alexandria subsequently, once he moved back to Syracuse. For example, we know that he's written a letter to the chief librarian of the library in Alexandria,

which was one of the wonders of the ancient world. Alexandria at the time was the cultural capital of the Mediterranean. It had taken over from Athens, if you like. Athens was in decline. And so if you wanted to go somewhere and you want to rub shoulders with philosophers and scientists and thinkers, you go to Alexandria. Following the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, Alexandria benefits from this really exciting fusion of Greek learning with tapping into those ancient Egyptian traditions as well. So you get this

extraordinary mix and the result was quite spectacular. Lots and lots of very interesting thinkers and geographers and scientists coming out of Alexandria at this period in this wonderful research facility, the Library of Alexandria. He would have studied maths. He would have studied, interestingly, catapult construction, practical application of that maths. The Ptolemies descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals, the man who eventually became ruler of Egypt. One of his famous descendants was Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies. They were particularly keen on catapults. You can imagine them sort of patronising all the scientists and thinkers and saying, lads, can we get something occasionally slightly useful so that I can defend this country and expand my dominions? And so Alexander became a hotbed of

catapult R&D. So clearly in Archimedes' story, you get a sense of the abstract, of knowledge for knowledge's sake, but also the practical. And in fact, Plutarch wrote, implying that he preferred the abstract, Plutarch said he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations, where there could be no reference to the vulgar needs of life. Well, unfortunately, the vulgar needs of life were about to include killing Romans before they swarmed over the wall of your city and killed you. So Archimedes had to turn his hand to the vulgar needs of life occasionally. You're listening to Dan Snow's History It,

talking about Archimedes, one of the great sieges of the classical world. Thanks for downloading this episode of Dan Snow's History It. If you don't already, you're going to want to sign up to our subscription service for this podcast, either on Apple or by heading over to History It and taking out a subscription there.

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But it wasn't just machines of war. We think he invented the Archimedean screw. You'll have seen these. They look like big corkscrews or augers. They're like a kind of drill bit enclosed in a cylindrical casing. And you lower the bottom into the water and then you turn the screw at the top and that lifts the water up. I've done this with my kids at science museums.

It lifts the water up so you can overcome a gradient and it's great for farmers and agriculture and irrigation. He was famously interested in the problem of water displacement as well. It's said that the king of Syracuse ordered the crowns to be made from a amount of gold. Then when the crown was ready, the king was like, hang on a minute, I think this craftsman might have put a little silver into the mix. I'm not sure this is pure gold. So he wanted to find out if it was pure. Now, you know the weight of the crown, because you can weigh it. If you submerge the crown in water, you can calculate the amount of water displaced.

So now you've got the volume of the crown. So if you know the weight and the volume, you can calculate its density. And you know the density of gold. So is the crown made out of solid gold? And it's water displacement that gives us the most famous Archimedes myth. He hopped in the bath, the bath spilled over and he jumped out shouting Eureka because he realised that his own volume

was displacing the identical volume of water and that can be very useful. Archimedes has been a huge influence on mathematicians ever since Galileo, for example, was obsessed with the crown and the water displacement. He wrote a treatise on hydrodynamics, doing this experiment in a slightly different way. So there we have a great example of an ancient treatise, something written, something performed apparently by Archimedes, influencing one of the great thinkers who helped to ignite the so-called scientific revolution, well,

of the great thinkers who helped to ignite the so-called scientific revolution, well, 1600, 1700 years later. Boom. In maths, Archimedes had tried to calculate a value of pi. He didn't call it pi. Yeah, we now know that it can't be fully calculated, and that's with all our modern firepower, which is crazy. But he tried to calculate a way of estimating the area of a circle, and he did it with polygons, straight edge shapes, and he gradually increased the number of sides until it almost corresponded with the circle. So he ended up with 96 sides, and he calculated a value of pi about 22 over 7. 22 over 7 is what people used until the advent of calculators. So it's pretty crazy. He also, by the way, doesn't have decimals. There are no decimals in the Greek alphabet, Greek numerical system. So pretty crazy. He also, by the way, doesn't have decimals. There are no

decimals in the Greek alphabet, Greek numerical system. So he's using an alphabetic system. You couldn't express big numbers because you run out of letters in the alphabet. So he actually came up with a new numerical system. He said, what I really want to do is calculate the number of grains of sand in the universe. Now, I think he was probably a reasonably long way off, but he came up with a way, a numerical system to demonstrate this, and he invented the term a myriad. A myriad, which is 10,000. So a myriad, myriad is 10,000, 10,000. That's why we say in a myriad of ways, which I didn't know. That, starting to calculate very big numbers, is all down to Archimedes. He apparently thought his greatest achievement was estimating the volume of a sphere, but perhaps of more interest to us is his practical

mechanics. He was a lever legend. A lever, as I'm sure you know, is just a bar with a pivot. You've got a long arm on one side and a short arm on the other. Think about air seesaws in the UK, or a teeter-totter, as my North American family members call it. You can put a kid on the long side, you put an adult on the short side, and yet they still counterbalance each other. So he was an expert in using mechanical advantage. Plutarch tells us, you remember that king I mentioned of Syracuse, Hyrule, he says that in bygone days the king had eagerly desired, and at last persuaded him to turn his art somewhat from abstract notions to material things, and by applying his philosophy to render it more evident to the common mind. He begged him to show him some great weight moved by a slight force.

Archimedes therefore fixed upon a three-masted merchantman, which had been dragged ashore by the great labours of many men, and after putting on board many passengers and the customary freight, he seated himself at a distance from her, and without any effort, but quietly setting in motion with his hand a system of compound pulleys, drew her towards him smoothly and evenly, as though she were gliding on the water. So Plutarch then says, Hyrule was amazed at this, and comprehending the power of his art, the king persuaded Archimedes to prepare for him offensive and defensive engines to be used in every kind of siege warfare. Now that was farsighted of Hyrule, because back to the siege, the Romans had arrived, and they were about to try and smash through the walls and sack the town.

Polybius, remember, we think the most reliable of the historians, says this. The Romans' wicker screens, missiles, and other siege apparatus had been made ready beforehand, and they felt confident. He says that they thought it would take them about five days to take the city. But, he continues, they failed to reckon with the talents of Archimedes, or to foresee that in some cases the genius of one man is far more effective than superiority in numbers. This lesson they now learned by experience. Polybius describes how the walls of the city take advantage of the geography of steep overhanging crags, of high ground, and just how

tough it is for a besieging force. And that's before these walls have been augmented with Archimedes' engines of war. Polybius says Archimedes had constructed the defence of the city in such a way both on Landward's side and to repel any attack from the sea. And Polybius says that Archimedes had left nothing to chance. The defenders on the walls did not have to improvise. They had everything they needed to hand and they were ready to respond to any enemy attack. The equipment was all in place, all serviceable, all ready to go. Polybius gives us an account of the moment that the Romans closed with the Syracusan defences. Each of Marcellus's vessels being filled with archers, slingers and javelin throwers,

whose task had been to drive the defenders from the battlements. So use your own artillery, clear the battlements, create a killing ground. That gives you an opportunity to get your ladders against the wall and send your elite infantry up and over the walls whilst the enemy are cowering in their dugouts. Not unlike, by the way, the tactics of the captain of the Redutabla, the Battle of Trafalgar, which you'll have heard on this podcast. He wanted to sweep HMS Victory's decks clear of men with his sharpshooters, his grenades, his canister-filled cannon, and then he wanted to swarm his crew across onto that empty deck so that he could take HMS Victory. Anyway, Marcellus is doing a similar thing here. He's taken more of his ships, taken out one side of the oars, grouped them in pairs. You've got kind of double ship rowing towards the walls. They were lashed together. And on these ships, he placed ladders four feet in width and

high enough to reach the top of the wall from where the fleet beaches. Polybius says that each side is fenced in with a high protective breastwork and the machine is also shielded by a wicker cover high overhead. So this itself is an ingenious mechanism of war. It's like a besieging tower carried forward on these two ships being rowed towards the beach. It beaches and then very brave infantrymen run up this ladder to the protected casemate at the top, which will be neatly resting on the walls, on the battlements, and they can hop out. Such a very, very clever use of ships, siege towers, and wicker armour. But, as Plutarch said, all this proved to be of no account in comparison with the engines of Archimedes. As the ships were approaching the shore,

Archimedes started shooting with his artillery, Polybius tells us, that could cover a whole variety of ranges. So while the attacking ships were still at a distance, he scored so many hits with his catapults and stone throwers that he was able to cause them severe damage and harass their approach. Then Polybius goes on. As the distance decreased, these weapons began to carry over the enemy's heads. He resorted to smaller and smaller machines and so demoralised the Romans that their advance was brought to a standstill. In the end, Marcellus was resumed in despair to bring up his ship secretly under cover of darkness. When they'd almost reached the shore, and were therefore too close to be struck by catapults, Archimedes had devised yet another weapon to repel the marines, who were fighting from the decks. He had the walls pierced

with large numbers of loopholes at the height of a man, which were about a palm's breadth wide. Behind each of these were archers, with so-called scorpions, a small catapult which discharged iron darts. They shot through the embrasures and put many of the marines out of action. With these tactics, he not only foiled all the enemy's attacks, both of those made at long range and any attempt at hand-to-hand fighting. He also caused them heavy losses. The Romans were astonished. Heavy rocks were smashing through the planking of their ships, sinking and disabling them. Iron bolts were being shot at point-blank range into their elite marines who tried to storm ashore. Roman troops were drowning at sea.

They were dying in the shallows. The quinqueremes were getting confused, steering into each other, their oars becoming entangled. The sea covered in floating wreckage, dead men lying as the waves lapped in the shallows. Again and again the Romans came forward, again the Romans came forward, but Archimedes had not yet displayed the full depth of his ingenuity. But Archimedes had not yet displayed the full depth of his ingenuity. Polybius tells us that Archimedes had other engines. At normal times, they were kept out of sight, but as soon as they were needed, they were hoisted above the walls,

with their beams projecting far over the battlements, some of them carrying stones weighing as much as ten talents, others large lumps of lead. As soon as the Roman ships approached, these beams were swung around on a universal joint and by means of a release mechanism or trigger, dropped the weight on the ships. The effect was not only to smash the ships and their scaling ladders, but to endanger the safety of the ships and their crews. Now we think a Roman talent is around 30 kilograms, so we're talking a 300 kg weight, a third of a ton, a rock dropped from height, smashing through the Roman decks. And

Archimedes wasn't done yet. For me, my favourite of his machines is the one that Polybius next describes. At the same time, a grappling iron attached to a chain would be let down and would clutch at the ship. As soon as the prow was securely gripped, the lever of the machine inside the wall would be pressed down. When the operator had lifted up the ship's prow in this way and made her stand on her stern, he made fast the lower parts of the machines so they would not move. And finally, by means of a rope and pulley, suddenly slackened the grappling iron and the chain. The result was that some of the vessels heeled over and fell on their sides,

others capsized, while the majority, when their bowels were let fall from a height, plunged underwater and filled, and thus threw all into confusion. The absolute horror, the surprise, the consternation of those Roman crews, both the officers and men on the decks, the slaves chained to the benches below. As your ship is pulled bodily out of the water, turned vertical, clinging to mast and rigging, desperate not to get plunged into the ocean in your armour. Many of them wouldn't have been able to swim. And then that ship being released, plunging down into the water, the sea pouring in through the rowing ports. The desperation, the screaming, ships foundering.

It was a sight unlike any other that had been played out in human history, all the result of one man's genius. Polybius says that Marcellus' operations were thus completely frustrated by these inventions of Archimedes, and when he saw that the garrison not only repulsed his attacks with heavy losses, but also laughed at his efforts, he took his defeat hard. Plutarch said that Romans felt they were fighting against the gods, now that countless mischiefs had been poured upon them from an invisible source. And defeat and terror proved to be contagious. Plutarch describes the fact that whenever they saw anything,

a little stick, a piece of wood hanging over the walls, they cried, Archimedes is training some engine upon us, and they turned their backs and fled. Seeing this, Marcellus desisted from all fighting and assault and thereon depended upon a long siege. Now we should probably come to one part of the Archimedes stories that I don't think sadly is true. It was said that he wrote a work on mirrors and some later, much later authors, believed that he might have been using these mirrors as lenses, as parabolic reflectors, to burn the Roman ships as they approached the Syracusan shore.

Lucian, who was writing in the 2nd century AD, like hundreds of years later, said that Archimedes destroyed enemy ships with fire. And there are other historians who say that he used burning glasses as a weapon. But friends, we have no near contemporary evidence for this at all, alas, because that would have been big time. groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

It wasn't just the maritime, the amphibious forces that were badly damaged. There were some Romans trying to attack from the landward side. They were crushed by stones. They were shot at by iron bolts. They were hit with artillery. They were also lifted up, men in armour, with grappling hooks let down from the walls. Archimedes was truly a legend of levers, a prince of pulleys.

I'm rather pleased with that. So there was simply no point continuing the assault, no point filling up the moat with Roman dead. Polybius says the Romans never again mounted a general assault. So true it is that the genius of one man became an immense, almost miraculous asset. So long as he was present, the Romans did not dare even to attempt an attack by any method which made it possible for Archimedes to oppose them. Instead, they concluded that in view of the large population of the town, the best way to reduce it was by starvation. They cut it

off by land and sea and they waited. Livy concludes that Roman forces had been frustrated by the, he says, unrivaled art of Archimedes. And so both sides settled down into a long siege, and as so often with long sieges, it wasn't the bravery of attacking troops, the genius of one side or another that decided the outcome but treachery it was treachery that would lead to the fall of Syracuse and seal the fate of Archimedes Livy describes a deserter who came to the Roman camp

he brought intelligence that the Syracusans were celebrating the festival of Diana that was to last three days and that as there was a deficiency of other things during the siege, the feasts would be more profusely celebrated with wine. Well, that's their first mistake. We haven't got enough bread, cheese, or fruit. Let's just drink wine instead. All right, lads. Back to Livy. When Marcellus received this intelligence, he selected such centurions and soldiers as had the courage and energy enough for so important an enterprise. Then the time, as it was supposed having arrived, when, after having feasted from the middle of the day, they would have had their fill of wine and begun to sleep,

he ordered the soldiers of one company to proceed with ladders, while about a thousand armed men were in silence marched to a spot to wait in a slender column. The foremost, having mounted the wall without noise or confusion, the others followed in order, the boldness of the former inspiring even the irresolute with courage. So as the Syracusans were in a drunken slumber, an elite force of Roman troops had mounted the wall. The thousand men following them quickly mounted the ladders and penetrated Syracusan defences. Plutarch tells us what happened next. When the Syracusans perceived this, they began to run about confusedly.

Marcellus ordered trumpets to sound on all sides at once and thus put them to flight in great terror, believing as they did that no part of the city remained uncaptured. Sadly, we don't have Polybius for this climax of the siege, so we have to rely on Plutarch. And he says that Marcellus at break of day looked out over the city and he's said to have wept in commiseration of its impending fate in little while after his army had sacked it. For among his officers there was not a man who had the courage to oppose the soldier's demand for a harvest of plunder. Nay, many of them actually urged that the city should be burned and razed

to the ground. Marcellus said no to this, but much against his will, under compulsion, he permitted booty to be made of property and slaves and with that the city was given over to plunder. It's a sad and terrible thing about siege warfare. The nature of breaking into a city means that you lose cohesion as the men are fighting house to house, as they're dealing with desperate citizens trying to protect their property and families and lives. Their blood is up and an orgy of violence often grips the attacking force. Added to that, the attackers had been frustrated by Archimedes' terrible weapons of war. They'd seen their friends killed, yanked off the ground, drowned, smashed, crushed, stabbed, shot. They

believed that Syracuse was theirs by right of conquest and they intended to make the most of that. Here was an opportunity after all the bloodshed, the disappointment, the hunger. Here was an opportunity for wealth, for sex, for power. Marcellus was apparently miserable, a lamentable fate of the city. Whilst Plutarch says there was great rejoicing of his followers, his spirit nevertheless evinced his sympathy and commiseration. He watched glorious property destroyed, vanishing, stolen, burned, smashed. Plutarch comments on the vast amounts of wealth that was carried away from Syracuse, one of the richest cities of the

Mediterranean. But, says Plutarch, what most afflicted Marcellus was the death of Archimedes. Now, we don't know how Archimedes died. We think that Marcellus issued strict orders, as you can imagine, to try and capture him alive, just as the Soviets, the Americans, and the Brits wanted those German, those Nazi scientists alive at the end of the Second World War so they could be put to work in their military programs, Marcellus was desperate to get hold of Archimedes. Now Plutarch gives a couple of different ways in which Archimedes may have met his end. We're not sure. Again, Polybius doesn't report his death. Plutarch says that a soldier chanced upon Archimedes while he was working by himself on some problem with the aid of a diagram. He was not aware of the incursions of the Romans or the capture of the city. He was so

engrossed in this geometrical problem. Suddenly a soldier came upon him and ordered him to go with him to Marcellus. This Archimedes refused to do until he'd worked out his problem and established his demonstration, whereupon the soldier flew into a passion drew his sword and dispatched him another version goes that Archimedes was in fact trying to get to Marcellus carrying his mathematical instruments like sundials and spheres and quadrants and things but some rioting that out drunken lusty soldiers thought he was carrying gold golden instruments they slew him and Marcellus was absolutely furious. Livy reports the version that Archimedes was working in the sand on some geometrical problem.

And as he was being killed, Livy reports that he said, leave my circles alone. And that's now part of the mythical Archimedes canon of stories. Later sources put his age at about 75 when he was killed, so he was a wise old man. Syracuse had fallen, the Romans had secured their position in Sicily, but Archimedes was dead. I should say that Archimedes would go on to enjoy a huge reputation. I mentioned that Galileo was particularly obsessed by him. Archimedes was often cited by those early modern scientists, mathematicians and engineers, both because of its genius and because of their

obsession with the ancient world. To tap into the work of Archimedes was a surefire way of being taken seriously in the Renaissance in the early modern period. It constituted a very prestigious precedent. The Second Punic War would rumble on. Hannibal would fight a seemingly endless campaign in Italy, but eventually the Romans would project force across to the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Scipio Africanus, one of the great generals of classical history, would defeat Hannibal just outside Carthage, and Carthage would be forced to submit to another humiliating defeat. Hannibal would go on as a scourge of Rome, the Romans hunting him down around the Mediterranean, but that, friends, is a different podcast which I think I might record.

And as for Carthage, eventually the Romans decided to finish the job. The Third Punic War was a quick, violent military expedition to destroy the city and make sure that never again could it pose a threat to Romans' mastery of the Mediterranean. A destruction so comprehensive that we still use the expression a Carthaginian peace. Thanks for listening, folks. I hope this added a little bit of context for you Indiana Jones fans out there. See you next time. you