Tom Holland

So we mentioned how there are these giant mechanical claws.

A later historian describes how these mechanical claws operated.

A ship would be seized by its prow, lifted up into the air, then dropped into the depths or spun round and round and smashed into the steep cliffs that jutted out beneath the wall of the city.

And sometimes we're told the ships would be shaken up and down until its crew had been thrown out and hurled in all directions.

And there is also, according to a guy called Anthemius of Tralles, a unanimous tradition that Archimedes used mirrors to direct the sun's rays at the enemy fleet and incinerate it.

Sadly not.

So Anthemius was writing about 600 years after the siege.

And I think the feeling among historians of science is that the stories of this kind of, you know, the mirrors being used to generate death rays were...

was probably inspired by a treatise that Archimedes had written about mirrors in which he did talk about using them to channel the rays of the sun to start fires.

And then it attains its kind of canonical form many, many hundreds of years later in the Byzantine era.

And this is a period from the walls of Constantinople, they're using Greek fire.

And so you can see how perhaps this story, you know, by process of endless elaboration comes to take on the form it does.

So I think, sadly, that's probably not true.

But I think the essentials are true.

Archimedes did devise these kind of innovative, terrifying war machines.

They did keep the Romans at bay.

And Marcellus himself, you know, I mean, he's annoyed.

that they're being kept at bay by these war machines but he's also incredibly impressed and becomes a great admirer of Archimedes and so Marcellus decides well we can't defeat Archimedes and these war machines so we're going to have to starve Syracuse but this is a massive problem because

You know, Archimedes has built these huge walls that go on for 17 miles.

So that doesn't really prove possible.