Archimedes described the mechanisms, then without any assistance, used a system of pulleys and a windlass to load a five-talent stone into the catapult. He pulled a lever and launched the stone so far out into the ocean that all we could see was a tiny splash of white where it entered the water. With two more stones, Archimedes demonstrated how to aim the device and adjust it for distance. “These catapults have the capacity to hit a ship at half a mile,” he said, “and if properly deployed can prevent a ship from entering the Great Harbor.”
Catapults of various sizes were situated along the battlement walkway. The smaller ones had less range, but greater accuracy. There were also a variety of ballistae. These huge tripod-mounted crossbows shot ten-foot long, metal-tipped javelins. Archimedes told the group that the ballistae had the power to propel a javelin through an ordinary metal shield and the soldier behind it, and were as accurate as a bow and arrow in the hands of a skilled archer.
Next Archimedes demonstrated something he called “the claw.” It was essentially a long lever, mounted on a pivot with compound pulleys and counter weights. The weights hung on the inside of the city wall and the wooden lever stretched some thirty feet or more outside the wall. A long chain and hook hung from the end of the lever. An additional rope with a set of pulleys ran down to the hook or “claw,” so that it could be opened or closed from above by the device’s operator.
Again Archimedes demonstrated the weapon by himself. Using levers to open and close the claw, he picked a large boulder from the surf below, lifted it in the air, and dropped it in another location twenty feet away. When Hippocrates asked him what this claw could be used for, Archimedes told him it could grip the prow of a ship, lift it fully out of the water, and drop it aft first into the sea. It seemed impossible, but after what Archimedes had already shown us, how could we not believe everything he said?
The officers’ awe increased as the tour progressed. Hippocrates’ reaction was more muted. He seemed to know these things were possible. Only a thin smile revealed his inner thoughts and the power these machines suggested to him.
After the demonstrations on the battlements, Archimedes led our group into the interior of the walls, where additional battle stations had been created at regular intervals around the city. These positions were equipped with scorpions, smaller handheld versions of the javelin-launching ballistae. Thin, rectangular windows had been cut into the walls at these stations. They were too narrow for a man to pass through, but perfectly designed for aiming and shooting the scorpions. A defender could shoot the scorpions’ metal darts at anyone attempting to scale the walls from the outside—with virtually no risk to himself.
When the tour ended, the soldiers fell silent. They had been shown weapons beyond their imaginations. One thing seemed certain. There was no way Marcellus could successfully storm the walls of Syracuse. As Archimedes had projected, we were likely headed for a long siege and blockade.
By the time we returned to the island, Archimedes really did need my assistance to climb to the top of the tower. He was tired and clearly emotionally spent as well. When we entered the workshop, he went straight to his workbench and sat down. He stared at his tray of sand without making a mark. After a while he stood and went over to the east window. He stared out at the sea for quite some time. Every now and then he dropped his head and stared at the floor.
I tried to keep my mind on my work, but his discomfort filled the room. I was so concerned that I found myself periodically looking up to make sure he hadn’t jumped out of the window. At one point he turned and met my gaze with his one clear eye.
“I feel as though I have made a huge mistake, Timon,” he said with a sigh. “From the beginning the great teachings have emphasized keeping the forms and the figures pure. Mathematics and geometry are powerful tools, but their application should be limited to the sand of an abacus. My applications have been a violation of the great teachings. I recognize the gravity of that error only now. Perhaps too late.” He hung his head so that his mass of white hair fell down around his face.
“But aren’t some of your inventions useful for things other than war?” I asked. “The water screw must be something good. The compound pulleys can save slaves the strain of moving heavy objects. Who knows, these devices might one day free the world of the need for slaves.”
He lifted his head and nodded very slightly. “That’s what I have thought, Timon. My cranes and pulleys, even these catapults that I’ve designed, I felt that they were good. Good for Hiero and good for Syracuse. But I’m not so sure any more.” He knit his brow and fixed his one good eye on me. “I’m still holding out that the defenses I’ve created will be so formidable that attacking this city—any city—will become impossible.”
I had heard him make this argument before. The first time it felt real. This second time it seemed forced, a rationalization.
“I imagine we will be finding out soon,” he muttered. He walked the length of the bench, opened a drawer, and took out the drawing of the parabolic array that he had been working on when Hippocrates had entered. “This,” he said as he unrolled the scroll, “is—or maybe was—to be my final piece of weaponry. Something so new and frightening that it would end warfare of all kinds forever with but one or two demonstrations. It’s precisely the new advance that Hippocrates is looking for. Today I’m not so sure I want to see it built.”
He rolled up the drawing and put it away, then looked at me. “Nothing that you have seen here, nothing that we do, leaves this workshop—for any reason.” He stopped to impress the importance of what he was saying, and had said several times before. “In exchange for your freedom when I die, Timon, you must promise me this.”
I nodded my head in the affirmative.
“For as long as you live.”
“Yes,” I said then—and yet now, these many years later, I am writing a narrative that will give it all away.
CHAPTER 57
I completed copying Archimedes’ letter to Eratosthenes the next day and was sent to the palace to deliver it to the courier. The administrator told me he had no idea when it would be put on a packet ship. From the lull of the ten-day truce, the city was in a panic, preparing for war. Everything was in anticipation of a siege.
I went from the courier’s office to the Achradina gate, then went north on Via Intermuralis to the market, thinking that I must see Moira. With war in the air, there was no telling when I would have the chance again. The streets were filled with people bustling about, making last minute preparations. Soldiers were everywhere. Men were being dragged from the drinking establishments and enlisted in the militia. I dodged through the crowd, clutching two coppers in my pocket. If Moira’s grandfather didn’t want her talking to a slave, at least I could say that I was a paying customer.
I turned into the market and stopped in my tracks. Instead of vendors and booths, I saw people setting up tents and temporary living shelters. Everyone knew three Roman legions were on their way from Leontini. The farmers and others who lived outside the city were abandoning their homes for the safety of Syracuse’s walls. They brought their chickens and goats and all the household goods they could carry. I felt certain that Moira and her grandfather must be part of this migration, but I had no idea where to find them.
I had been searching for a while when I saw Corax and his band of brigands coming my way. I made an effort to dodge out of their path, but the crowd was so thick I had nowhere to go.
One of the boys spotted me. “Isn’t that the boy with the figs?”
“Let’s get him!” Corax shouted, and suddenly they were coming after me. It was sport to them and body and limb to me. I pushed and shoved through the throng with the gang behind me. People cursed at me as I scooted between tents, over and around the odds and ends that littered the street, doing everything I could to lose the gang of boys.
Corax was the biggest and fastest. I could hear him gaining on me and urging his buddies on. I felt his hand on my shoulder. Suddenly Corax and I wer
e tumbling on the ground. I scooted away from him on hands and knees, with people all around shouting at us. He managed to take hold of my ankle, but I kicked out of his grasp, catching him firmly in the face with my heel.
“You’re meat now!” he yelled at me. I squirmed beneath the canvas of a tent and out the other side, stumbling through a cluster of small pigs, finally escaping from the mass of people and breaking into a dead run. I didn’t slow down until I was sure I had lost Corax and his buddies.
Despite the close call and the panic I felt, I was still determined to find Moira. I headed south from the Tyche district to the garden park in Neapolis, thinking she might be there.
She wasn’t.
I spent a short time looking for the man with the port-wine birthmark, then returned to Ortygia wondering if I would ever see Moira again. With war on the horizon, her grandfather might have decided to leave the region altogether. Here it was again—the war with Hannibal. Everything was up for grabs. Today it was this way. Tomorrow that. Who could know? I went to bed that night heartbroken and angry.
CHAPTER 58
Marcellus knew of Archimedes’ miraculous devices, including the pulleys and levers that allowed one man to move an entire ship. Yet he still believed that the ultimate weapon was a sharp gladius in the hand of a trained soldier—because in the end, all battles, whether on land or sea, whether between many or few, came down to hand-to-hand combat. At least that’s how Marcellus saw it from his camp in Leontini the day he got word that Appius and his three legions had arrived in Syracuse.
Something in Archimedes’ science, Marcellus told me years later, reminded him of the strategies that Hannibal had introduced to the Romans on the battlefield. War was changing in more ways than one. For this reason, and for the future of Rome, Marcellus wanted to meet Archimedes. He wanted to talk to him. He wanted to see his inventions in action. Maybe they were nothing. Maybe the stories were exaggerated. But maybe they were a way to defeat Hannibal.
Syracuse would have been a difficult city to capture even without Archimedes. It was entirely surrounded by a perimeter of tall stone walls, much of it footed by precipitous cliffs or the sea. Inside those walls were no fewer than fifteen thousand soldiers. Add the unknown of the old man’s war machines, and many would have called Syracuse an impossible target to besiege. Marcellus was prepared to march on Syracuse nonetheless. He had come from Italy with all manner of siege equipment. It would be assembled when his legions made camp on the farmland outside the city. With ladders, penthouses, tortoises, ramming devices, mantlets, mining equipment, and catapults, plus the best army in the world, commanded by the most respected field officer in the Roman military, Marcellus entered into the siege of Syracuse confident of success.
What he didn’t know was that Hiero had anticipated it all. The late king had seen the power of Archimedes’ machines firsthand. A soldier of no modest capacity himself, he was able to imagine the next generation of warfare. Early on in his reign, he deliberately cultivated a friendship with his wife’s cousin Archimedes. Hiero provided the scientist with anything he could want or need—money, materials, manpower, and correspondence around the world. In exchange, he asked Archimedes to redesign the defenses of the city. He wanted Syracuse to be a citadel, so well-armed that no one would dare attack it. What Archimedes created surely surpassed Hiero’s wildest dreams. I saw it in action.
CHAPTER 59
Despite lingering regrets about applying the pure realm of numbers to mechanical devices, Archimedes continued work on two projects of applied optics: the perfection of a large array of parabolic mirrors and his personal quest to improve his own vision. His drawings of the array were nearly complete. He planned to break the project down into its component parts and have them made individually by different craftsmen so that no one person would know what they were for. The crystal lens allowed him to do the original drawings, but peering through the imperfect lens strained his one working eye and made the chore painfully slow, with results that were difficult to read. I had the chore of copying everything.
The frustration of working with the single lens drove Archimedes to experiment with other types of lenses or combinations of lenses to correct his vision. He had made compound pulleys, why not compound lenses? Early in the morning, six days after Appius’ arrival, Archimedes pushed all the political distractions out of his mind and concentrated on this one task.
Throughout my time with Archimedes, he had worked at making glass beads. Every now and then I would fire up the furnace and pump the bellows, and he would make small batches of clear glass, which he would fashion into beads. This particular morning, I watched as he retrieved a small painted box from a shelf on the north wall of the workshop. I had seen the box before. It contained the entire set of beads he had made, plus some others that he had obtained in Alexandria. He spilled them out on the workbench beside his abacus like a collection of precious jewels and called me to his side.
Archimedes used his wooden stylus to draw the profile of the crystal lens on the surface of the sand. Then he drew three parallel lines passing perpendicularly through the lens and converging in a single point on the other side. “This is how it works,” he said. “Light passing through the lens is focused into a point, but the rays of light don’t stop at that point.” He extended the lines in the sand. “They continue in straight lines beyond the point of focus, where they diverge and continue diverging. I want to try combining one of these beads with the crystal lens in the same way we used the crystal lens with the pinhole in the window shutter. I believe we want to place the bead just a short distance beyond the focal point.” He pointed to the location. “As we’ve seen with the candles, this will reverse the image—left to right, top to bottom. That’s what we want to explore today.”
I nodded as though I understood more than I did.
We began by mounting the crystal lens in a wooden annulus that acted as a frame. The frame was then attached to the end of the workbench so that the lens was aimed out the north window and slightly downward. From the diameter and curvature of the lens, Archimedes was able to calculate its focal length. It was about the length of my arm. He marked that distance on the workbench as a reference point. Using a pair of small wooden tweezers, he picked a glass bead off the workbench. He held the bead, pinched in the tweezers, up close to his one good eye, and from a distance very close to the focal length of the lens, tried to look through the bead and the crystal lens at the same time. Kneeling beside the workbench, using one bead then another, he proceeded, varying the distance from the crystal lens, forward and back, hoping to bring clarity to what he was seeing.
After much agonizing effort, and quite a bit of time, he finally stood, putting a hand to his back, and shook his head in frustration. “This isn’t working. My hand is too unsteady and my eye too weak. I’m simply incapable of doing this properly.”
After a moment, he turned to me. “I’d like you to give it a try, Timon. I want you to be my eyes. Either this idea is simply wrong or the problem is my eyes and my age.” He handed me the tweezers and asked me if I understood what I was supposed to do.
“You want me to use one of the beads to look through the crystal. Sort of like looking through a small knothole aligned with a larger one.”
“And then tell me what you see.” He smiled the way he always smiled when I understood more than he had anticipated. “The beads are all slightly different. One might be better than another. Try them one by one.”
Using the tweezers, I picked a bead off the table. I knelt in front of the crystal lens and situated myself the same way Archimedes had. I began at a distance much greater than the focal length, and squinting my eye into the bead, moved closer, little by little, trying to find the lens’ focal point as Archimedes had described. At first everything was a blur. There was nothing to see. Then all of a sudden an image—of what I wasn’t sure—appeared in the crystal lens. Then it disappeared. It came and went several more times as I moved back and forth just beyond the f
ocal length of the crystal.
I gradually began to understand what I was trying to do—catch and steady that fleeting image—whatever it was. But I couldn’t quite do it. All the while, I was telling Archimedes what I was seeing, and he urged me on, encouraging me to try other beads. I went through eight with no improvement.
I took hold of a ninth bead with the tweezers and squinted into it. With much effort I found the fleeting image. It came and went—then I held it momentarily. It looked like a stone surface—but where? It so befuddled me, I lowered the bead and looked out past the mounted lens. My line of vision was directed across the moat to the wall protecting Achradina. It seemed impossible. Could I really be seeing that distant stone wall?
Archimedes saw it in my face. “What is it? Is it improving your ability to see?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, and applied myself to the bead again. This time I managed to focus on the image long enough to decipher it. The magnification was so great it frightened me. It was like looking into a different world, a different dimension. I had the sense that I could reach out and touch the wall, even though it was well more than a hundred feet away.
I looked up at Archimedes, bewildered. “What’s far is near, master. I don’t understand.”
“Tell me exactly what you’re seeing.”
“I think I’m looking at the wall across the channel,” I said, pointing. “I’m seeing the surface very close up. I can make out the sand in the mortar between the individual stones.”
Archimedes nodded. He turned the annulus slightly to the right and adjusted its aim upward. “How about now?”
Catching that first glimpse of a distant object through the two lenses was hard; holding the image still long enough to decipher it was harder yet. But I was getting better at it. And there it was! A soldier on a parapet—upside down! I lowered the bead and looked out the window in the direction I was aimed. There were no men on the wall that I could see. I told this to Archimedes.
The Siege of Syracuse Page 24