Battles and Tactics

by Bob Bennett

  Indeed by pitting his native wit against the brute force of the elephants, Damis rendered their physical strength useless. He studded many great frames with sharp nails and buried them in shallow trenches, concealing the projecting points; over them he left a way into the city, placing none of the troops directly in front of it, but posting on the flanks a great many javelin throwers, bowmen and catapults.3

  The Megalopolitans had laid an elephant trap of some sophistication and it was not long before it was tested:

  As Polyperchon was clearing the debris from the whole extent of the breach [in the original wall] and making an attack through it with all the elephants in a body, a most unexpected thing befell them. There being no resistance in front, the Indian mahouts did their part in urging them to rush into the city all together; but the animals as they charged violently, encountered the spike studded frames. Wounded in their feet by the spikes, their own weight causing the points to penetrate, they could neither go forward any farther nor turn back because it hurt them to move.4

  With the huge beasts blocking the breach, the men behind them were unable to proceed and the Megalopolitans began to rain missiles down upon them, particularly aiming for the Indian drivers who were the only people able to control the elephants. When the leading animal collapsed, both from the pain of the wounds in his feet and the harassment of enemy missiles, his fellow beasts became demoralized. Chaos resulted with the elephants either crumpling in a heap or turning back and trampling over their own men. Polyperchon, deflated at the complete failure of what he was certain was a strategy that would win the day, had to call off the attack.

  This was substantially the end of the siege and this reverse was compounded by news arriving of the destruction of his navy under Cleitus.5 It all meant that Polyperchon found himself feeling very exposed amongst the hills of Arcadia. This was, in fact, the beginning of the end for the veteran general as a major player though he would erupt occasionally into the Diadochi world for years to come. He virtually called off the siege, taking most of his army and leaving only a token force around the bloodied but unbowed city of Megalopolis. The bubble was bursting, the morale within the ranks of the royal army was deeply affected and some of the mainland Greek cities defected to Cassander. Setbacks at Piraeus and Megalopolis set in motion an erosion of support that would dramatically change the balance of power in the Balkans and end with Antipater’s son established on the Macedonian throne at Pella.

  The second siege we know much about took place in 304 BC at Rhodes, after many years when Antigonus and his extraordinary son had been battling against Cassander, Ptolemy, Seleucus and Lysimachus, the other generals who had established themselves in the post-Alexandrine world. The siege is one of the great events of the age partly because it was a proxy battle between all the other rulers, sustained by the plucky islanders of Rhodes and the Antigonids, and partly because of the character of Demetrius who led the besieging forces. The thread of military invention that ran through much of the fourth century bore extraordinary fruit under the young Antigonid. His efforts were limitlessly imaginative and occasionally absurd but his technical vision touched a chord with contemporaries who could not help admiring that aspect of his achievement even when deploring his lack of personal propriety. The siege of Rhodes was one of the epic contests of this epoch, and in it Demetrius would hit peaks of engineering ingenuity. Another factor was that the success of the defenders in repelling such an over-mighty enemy led directly to the building of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  Demetrius assembled the expedition to bring the city into line at Loryma, on the Carian mainland, almost directly opposite Rhodes city, and for a time it seemed that the mere presence of the young conqueror with his ships, soldiers and siege engines would be enough to ensure success. The islanders sent envoys to explain that they had re-thought their position and were now prepared to join the alliance against Ptolemy as Antigonus required. But now even virtual capitulation was not sufficient. Demetrius had been put to considerable trouble to mobilize his armament and he was determined to ensure that if he disbanded it the Rhodians would not once more change their minds. Against just such a contingency, he demanded the islanders hand over 100 leading citizens as hostages and that he be allowed to enter Rhodes harbour with his fleet to collect them. This proved the last straw for the proud republic; they had agreed to all the required conditions but still these tyrants wanted more. The envoys withdrew and the island determined to resist the invader. There is something about these exchanges that does not ring true; giving hostages was normal practice and having conceded the key demands it seems strange they should risk destruction over this issue. The likeliest explanation is that Rhodes had long since decided on resistance and the protracted negotiations had been purely to gain time to prepare their defences.

  Demetrius descended with his 200 warships and 170 transports, 40,000 soldiers and pirate allies. This formidable armament arrived outside the port of Rhodes and, this was not all as it is also claimed, there were almost another 1,000 yachts and trading craft owned by maritime entrepreneurs eager to join in the looting of Rhodes. The citizens of the town which rose up from the shore like a great amphitheatre were treated to an extraordinary sight ‘so that the whole space between the island and the opposite shore was seen to be filled with his vessels’.6 After this attempt to strike fear into the hearts of the opposition, the invaders looked to set up a safe base. Round the coast a suitable landing place was found and a protected camp built, far enough to be out of missile range but near enough to keep his victim in constant apprehension of a surprise attack. Then Demetrius ordered that a breakwater be built to ensure the enemy could not easily get at his boats and a triple palisade was erected to protect the camp against enemy sorties.

  Control of the well-defended harbour was crucial to both sides as it would allow an effective blockade to be applied. Shipwrights roped cargo scows together and mounted towers and batteries of ballistae, protected by penthouses (sheds of hides, boards and padding to give protection to the men working the machines) on their decks. In front of these clumsy catamarans, a floating boom fixed with large spikes was built to deter the nimble Rhodian warships from ramming them. Other boats were armoured with thick wooden planks and filled with catapults and Cretan archers. The task force approached the port, intending to clear the defenders from the walls of the harbour with their missiles before the assault troops went in.

  The Rhodians for their part also used ballistae and catapults placed in ‘machines on the mole and three upon freighters near the boom of the small harbour’.7 Other ships at anchor were also utilized for catapults. The two sides ultimately failed to engage with each other due to rough weather but in a night raid the Antigonids did win a small foothold on the mole that protected Rhodes harbour. Here, 500 feet from the main town defences, Demetrius constructed a siege fort with a garrison of 400 men as a base for further efforts. But the Rhodians dug in and began to throw up a series of jerry-built walls to isolate the fort. There was hard and bloody fighting for eight days, reminiscent of nothing so much as the Athenian siege of Syracuse in 415 BC. There, too, it had been hard work with walls thrown up to cut off the enemy and then counter walls built to intercept the other’s line of building.

  While the battle on the mole was pressed, a continuous attack was maintained on the rest of the waterfront area. Seaborne engines were brought up time and time again to try and drive the defenders off the walls around the port while the Rhodians used combustible missiles and even fire-ships to good effect. A surge on the eighth day got Demetrius’ men onto a part of the harbour wall and it looked, for a time, as if from this bridgehead they would break into the town. But, the defenders, with their existence at stake, threw every soldier into the breach and drove them back. And, later the same day, when assault troops seemed about to establish themselves in another sector, desperate defence once more prevailed and the attackers lost heart when officers as well as men were pus
hed to their deaths onto the rocky seashore below.

  After this, the Antigonids drew away to repair the damage to ships and engines and regroup. For a week Demetrius geed up their spirits before trying again. The second offensive was carelessly handled. They aimed to destroy the ships in the port and surprise the defenders on the walls. In fact, three Rhodian ships in the harbour got under way and inflicted great damage on the Antigonid fleet until numbers overcame them. The weather then intervened and some of Demetrius’ engine-bearing vessels were wrecked by a sudden storm and, thus encouraged, the defenders attacked the Antigonids’ fort on the mole, took it and captured the garrison. The loss of his one calculable success dispirited Demetrius and he prudently withdrew to the shelter of his artificial harbour.

  This was to be the last onslaught by Demetrius in a miserable season in front of Rhodes’ walls and his disappointment was further compounded by the sight of reinforcements sailing into the port he had so singularly failed to close; 650 (some of them Rhodian) mercenaries who had been sent by Ptolemy and other friends in Crete. Winter storms now threatened, putting a stop to any possibility of continuing the assault and the Antigonids resigned themselves to wintering on the island.

  Failure both to capture the port and cut off the supply of reinforcements caused a change of tactic in 303 BC. Demetrius turned his attention away from the harbour to the land walls of the town. As soon as the weather allowed, soldiers built trenches and palisades, miners began the tunnels that would snake under the walls and his engineers uprooted every tree on the island to construct the machines that would directly assault Rhodes’ defences. Epimachus of Athens was responsible for the building of the giant helepolis used against Rhodes. A smaller machine had been deployed against Salamis in Demetrius’ siege of the Cypriot city in 307 BC (shortly before the naval battle where he routed Ptolemy). At Salamis:

  he constructed a device called the ‘helepolis’ which had a length of forty-five cubits on each side and a height of ninety cubits. It was divided into nine storeys, and the whole was mounted on four solid wheels each eight cubits high…On the lower levels of the helepolis he mounted all sorts of ballistae, the largest of them capable of hurling missiles weighing three talents; on the middle levels he placed the largest catapults, and on the highest his lightest catapults and a large number of ballistae; and he also stationed on the helepolis more than two hundred men to operate these engines in the proper manner.8

  As a cubit is 1.5 feet approximately (though there are several possible different measures of cubit), the helepolis would have been 135 feet high, 68 feet square and its four wheels would have been 12 feet in diameter. This wooden Cyclops was destroyed by fire-bearing arrows from the city which was under the control of Menelaus, Ptolemy’s brother, although Demetrius eventually captured the town.

  Presumably learning from this experience, the helepolis used at Rhodes was certainly the largest ever constructed and, indeed, has never been surpassed. We have four different descriptions of the machine by Vitruvius, Plutarch (in his life of Demetrius), Diocles of Abdera (as recorded by Athenaeus Mechanicus) and Diodorus. Unfortunately, there are significant variations in measurement but the machine was most likely 150 feet high and 75 feet square at the base, thus bigger than its Salamis counterpart though not by that much. The helepolis was made of wood but its three exposed sides were protected by iron plates. This protected it from fire and the fate its predecessor had suffered at Salamis. In addition, the inside was covered by expanses of animal hide designed to protect the men within from ballista and catapult fire. The machine was on eight wheels, each 20 feet high (the one at Salamis had four wheels), and also had casters so it could allegedly be moved sideways as well as forwards and backwards.

  How it was moved is a mystery and much ink has been spilt trying to solve it. To move such a huge machine would have required prodigious manpower and it has been suggested that up to 800 men would have been needed, exposing them to considerable risk from the firepower of the defenders. It has also been doubted whether there would have been enough room for this number of men to be accommodated even if some were inside the machine as well as outside. Another alternative has been mooted, that of the use of draught animals such as cattle. We know that they were used in other circumstances. Xenophon records that Cyrus, the Persian king, used just such a method:

  So Abradatas set to work, and this four-poled chariot of his gave Cyrus the idea of making a car with eight poles, drawn by eight yoke of oxen, to carry the lowest compartment of the battering engines, which stood, with its wheels, about twenty-seven feet from the ground. Cyrus felt that if he had a series of such towers brought into the field at a fair pace they would be of immense service to him, and inflict as much damage on the enemy. The towers were built with galleries and parapets, and each of them could carry twenty men.9

  But the use of animals could easily be neutralized by the defenders killing them at a distance as the Goths found to their cost in 537 AD at the siege of Rome. They tried to pull a siege tower to the walls by the use of oxen, only to find that the Romans simply shot them whilst the machine was still some distance away, thus effectively extinguishing the threat. It is also the case that Cyrus’ tower was not a siege tower, as such, but a tower used behind the main battle line to throw and catapult missiles at the enemy. In this case, the oxen would presumably have been led away (once they had brought the tower into position) to safety.

  A third alternative, the use of winches and pulleys has been suggested. It appears that there was a winch in Poseidonius’ machine built for Alexander in the 330s BC. If Epimachus’ helepolis also had one it could, in theory, have been driven by some sort of continuous belt drive but doubt has been poured on this concept on the grounds that this method was probably not known until the Middle Ages with the invention of the spinning wheel and also, even if it existed, whether such a large machine could have been moved in this way is problematic. However, men could also, in theory, have run forward to position bolt anchor points in the ground and then attach ropes to them and run these back to be attached to the winch. Men inside the helepolis could then winch it forward to the anchor points, perhaps aided by men physically pushing the machine. But all these methods of propulsion remain pure conjecture.

  Whatever mode of transport was used some points are clear. Animals and/or men involved in moving the machines were at high risk from the defenders and to move it must have been ponderous in the extreme, the machine probably not moving more than a few hundred feet a day. The notion of sideways movement alluded to in our sources seems even more unlikely.

  The helepolis was divided (as with the one used at Salamis) into nine separate storeys reached by two internal staircases, one for ascending and one for descending, both of which went from the ground floor to the very top. Each storey had ‘ports on the front, in size and shape fitted to the individual characteristics of the missiles that were to be shot forth’.10 These ports, which had shutters, were protected by animal hides to absorb the blows of enemy missiles.

  The lowest storey contained apparatus for throwing stones, in the middle storeys were catapults and on the highest levels further catapults and stone throwing machines were housed. The heaviest catapults were placed on the lower levels and at Salamis, Diodorus recounts that one catapult was capable of throwing missiles of 3 talents. Presumably similar-sized catapults were housed in Epimachus’ construction at Rhodes but 3 talents are roughly 180 pounds in imperial measurements. If it wasn’t for the other huge measurements involved in all the various other siege machinery it would be tempting to consider this a mistake in the sources, since these are truly huge balls and it is difficult to see how they could have been loaded, let alone fired. One also wonders about the potential for catastrophic mistakes as they were fired from a virtually enclosed space within the tower.11

  It is thought that an incredible 3,600 men may have been needed to man the machine. The weight may have been over 160 tons. According to Vitruvius, Epimachus

&nbs
p; constructed at enormous expense, with the utmost care and exertion, an helepolis one hundred and thirty-five feet high and sixty feet broad. He strengthened it with hair and rawhide so that it could withstand the blow of a stone weighing three hundred and sixty pounds shot from a ballista; the machine itself weighed three hundred and sixty thousand pounds.12

  The helepolis was not the only machine Demetrius had built; he had no less than eight so-called ‘tortoises’ for filling ditches. These were essentially movable sheds or ‘penthouses’ as Diodorus called them, which provided cover for men to fill in the enemy moat outside the walls. We even have a detailed design for them written by Vitruvius, admittedly 300 years later:

  A tortoise intended for the filling of ditches, and thereby to make it possible to reach the wall is to be made as follows. Let a base, termed in Greek eschara, be constructed, with each of its sides twenty-one feet long, and with four crosspieces. Let these be held together by two others, two thirds of a foot thick and half a foot broad; let the crosspieces be about three feet and a half apart, and beneath and in the spaces between them set the trees, termed in Greek hamaxopodes, in which the axles of the wheels turn in iron hoops. Let the trees be provided with pivots, and also with holes through which levers are passed to make them turn, so that the tortoise can move forward or back or towards its right or left side, or if necessary obliquely, all by the turning of the trees.13

  They were constructed with four sloping sides so enemy missiles would simply hit the fireproofed tortoise and roll off. They had wheels but how they moved, as in the case of the helepolis, is open to question. Being smaller they could have been simply pushed into action though how they were able to move sideways, as Vitruvius mentions, again is not known. Although the measurements of Demetrius’ tortoise are not mentioned, other examples suggest they would have provided cover for up to fifty or sixty men to work in filling the ditches. Diodorus is vague in his description of them only saying that they provided cover for ‘sappers’ which might possibly imply they were also used to provide cover for men to undermine the walls, though this is not attested to elsewhere in ancient history.