King Hiron died in 216 BC and the New King of Syracuse Hippocrates decided to form an alliance with

Carthage a great city that lay across the Mediterranean on the coast of North Africa. At this time the
power of Rome was growing very fast and a Sicily was close to Rome the Syracuse’s hoped that an
alliance with the Carthaginians who were the Romans main rivals might discourage Rome from trying
to take them over. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. The Romans sent an army commanded
by a general named Marcellus to invade and conquer Sicily. Marcellus came with a fleet of 60 ships.
The Romans were themselves excellent engineers. They brought with them great catapults designed
to hurl darts and other missiles at the defenders of Syracuse and a truly massive siege tower called a
Sambuca with ladders to scale the walls. The Sambuca was so huge that it was mounted on the decks
of eight ships which were roped together. Marcellus landed some of his army down the coast and
then he attacked the city simultaneously from both land and sea confident of the walls would fall
quickly to his forces. He had not reckoned on Archimedes. It is said that Archimedes had placed great
curved mirrors on the city walls, which when they were all turned together cast the concentrated race
of the sun onto the Roman ships causing many of them to burst into flames. The Sambuca as it came
close to the walls was completely destroyed by catapults tossing huge boulders onto the ships on
which it was mounted. As the third boulder struck it the whole mighty machine crumbled and
collapsed into the sea. The Roman historian Plutarch who wrote a book about the campaign reported
what happened next. When Archimedes began to apply his engines, he had one shot against the land
forces all sorts of missiles and immense masses of stone against which no man could stand. For they
knocked down those upon whom they fell in heaps breaking all their ranks. In the meantime, huge
poles thrust out from the walls over the ships and sunk some by great weights, which they let down
from on high upon them. Others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or claw and when they had
drawn them up by the prow and set them on end, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea.
Marcellus called off his attack and decided to lay siege to the city instead in an attempt to starve the
defenders into submission. For three years the Roman sat outside the walls and their fleet blockaded
the harbor preventing any supplies coming into the city by the sea. Eventually, the Romans
discovered an unguarded part of the war, and mounting a surprise attack, they managed to breach
the city’s defenses. As the Roman soldiers ran through the city one of them came upon Archimedes
who was drawing some figures in the sand. Archimedes as ever absorbed in his calculations angrily
told the soldier not to disturb his work. The soldier did not know who he was and so drew his sword
and struck him down. Marcellus who had given orders that Archimedes was not to be harmed was
very sorry to learn of his death. He ordered that he'd be buried with great ceremony and on his
tombstone was engraved a diagram showing a cylinder containing a sphere to commemorate his
most important work. Oddly enough, Archimedes who was the most famous inventor of the ancient
world had no interest in fame himself and believed that the invention of anything that might actually
make a profit for the inventor was a selfish pursuit that satisfied only the lowest ambitions of men.
And it is perhaps sad to reflect that in his own lifetime, it was for the creation of war machines that he
was most renowned. The descriptions of some of these may be exaggerated, for example, no one else
has ever managed to make a burning mirror such as he is said to have used in the siege of Syracuse to
set fire to the Roman ships but his levers and pulleys and the water screw are still in common use
today more than 2,000 years after he invented them and his principal theorems have formed the
basis for mathematics architecture and engineering ever since.