Archimedes at Syracuse: The Claw, Torsion Artillery and Rome's Long Siege

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

For about 50 years King Hiero II kept Syracuse a loyal ally of Rome. After his death his grandson Hieronymus was manipulated by an anti-Roman faction and assassinated, and the brothers Epicydes and Hippocrates, who had served under Hannibal in Italy, took control. With the Second Punic War raging, Rome sent Marcus Claudius Marcellus in 213 BC to besiege the city by land and sea. Defending it was Archimedes, a mathematician close to 80 who turned his work on levers and compound pulleys into weapons against the Roman sambuca, a siege tower built on two lashed warships.

Calibrated torsion catapults and ballistas struck ships at range, and the claw, a hidden crane behind the sea wall, hooked galleys, lifted their prows from the water, and dropped them to capsize or smash on the rocks. The siege stalled until 212 BC, when Romans scaled the walls during a festival to Artemis and opened the outer city. Marcellus ordered Archimedes spared, but a soldier who did not recognize him killed him after the old man told him to leave his diagrams alone. The citadel of Achradina held out eight more months until the Iberian mercenary captain Moericus opened a gate near the fountain of Arethusa, and the city was sacked.

• Archimedes' torsion weapons stored energy in tightly twisted bundles of animal sinew or rope wound by winches.
• A block and tackle let a small team of men or oxen inside the walls lift the prow of a Roman galley into the air.
• Historians and scientists dismiss the story of burning mirrors, since a moving ship could not hold a focal point long enough to ignite.
• Carthaginian supply ships slipped through the Roman blockade in bad weather, keeping the city fed.
• By 210 BC Sicily was a Roman province and later became the staging ground for Rome's invasions of Africa.