by Bob Bennett
Last but not least of Demetrius’ remarkable and innovative machines were two ram tortoises: ‘two enormous penthouses in which battering rams were mounted’.14 He also had two similar machines at Salamis. Diodorus goes on to describe these rams as being 180 feet long, wrapped in iron and that no less than 1,000 men were used to move the tortoises. We have descriptions of ram tortoises built for Alexander by Diades and also a detailed description by Vitruvius and Athenaeus Mechanicus of one built by Hegetor of Byzantium in the same era. A specific link between Hegetor and Demetrius has been suggested but is controversial.15
The ram tortoise from Vitruvius’ description seems to have consisted of a tortoise like the ditch-filling tortoise, only bigger and with eight wheels. However, with the ram tortoise a central turret was needed to utilize the ram. The ram appears to have been suspended above the turret underneath an observation point. How the ram swung back and forth to hit the city walls again is pure conjecture. The ram was presumably suspended in a harness and controlled by ropes below on perhaps some sort of pulley system. As for the tortoise itself, Hegetor’s and presumably Demetrius’ had eight wheels. Just to compound the problems of interpretation several commentators have questioned whether a 180 feet ram would be at all practical.16
To shift these engineering marvels was a feat in itself and, to ensure they could be moved smoothly up to the city walls, a roadway was created so wide that it covered the distance between seven of the towers that studded the landward curtain wall of the city. This prodigious effort, alone, apparently took 30,000 labourers to accomplish, with the crews of the fleet being recruited for the task. The fears of the Rhodians could be imagined when they saw the helepolis ponderously moving down the levelled road towards them with four ditch-filling tortoises and one monstrous ram tortoise on either side. The Antigonids eventually manhandled their machines up to the walls and a general assault was ordered. While massed ballistae and catapults opened fire, the galleys simultaneously came out from behind their defensive boom and attacked the harbour once more. However, the Rhodians were not idle themselves and sent out nine ships to look for aid and which, in the event, sank some of Demetrius’ galleys and plundered their stores and provisions, which somehow they got back to the city. They also captured a quadrireme which apparently had Demetrius’ royal robes on it, painstakingly made or acquired for him by his wife Phila (Antipater’s daughter and ex-wife of Craterus).
But at the walls, battering rams and soldiers with picks and bores soon began to make short work of the lower courses of stone. The main curtain wall was undermined to such an extent that the defenders found they could not keep open the walkway that ran the whole of its length. However, strengthened in their resolve by the arrival of more supply ships sent by Ptolemy, and food aid from both Cassander and Lysimachus, they counterattacked and drove back Demetrius’ men and machines.
Despite the resultant loss of precious time, soon the contraptions were laboriously rolled back for a further assault. The already-weakened curtain wall now collapsed completely. Bloody battles were fought for the towers that remained standing and both sides suffered considerable casualties in the rubble of the breached and broken defences. When they finally broke through, Demetrius’ forces found, to their chagrin, that the enemy had built another wall behind the first. The wooden beams and masonry from the houses that had stood close up to the original wall had been used to construct this second obstacle as well as using masonry from the theatre and various temples. The Rhodians promised to repay the gods with bigger and better ones if they could prevail against the Antigonids. Not content with this, they were now engaged on building a third wall in the event of the second not holding.
These makeshift defences were a real problem for the attackers. Demetrius’ engines would have had great difficulty in being manoeuvred over the intervening rubble to reach the second line of defence. It was further compounded by the fact that the resourceful Rhodians had also dug a moat between the walls. Demetrius was, by now, almost at his wits’ end. The blockade had not worked, a fact underlined by another defeat handed out at about this time to a corsair fleet off the coast of Caria. Demetrius’ main pirate ally had been captured with his ships and escorted back to the port of Rhodes. Now the land attack had faltered in the face of the ingenuity and industry of the defenders. Even an attempt to bribe the commander of the guard (a mercenary from Miletus) failed.
The Rhodians further compounded Demetrius’ problems by launching a night fire-missile assault on the helepolis. They dislodged some fire plates on the contraption which was only saved by Demetrius being able to get men to drag it out of missile range, though how this could have been done so quickly is again a mystery. Interestingly, Vitruvius has another more colourful version of events on how the machine was stopped in its tracks :
After a great amount of water, filth, and excrement had been poured out during the night, on the next day the helepolis moving up, before it could reach the wall, came to a stop in the swamp made by the moisture, and could not be moved forwards, nor later even backwards. And so Demetrius, when he saw that he had been baffled by the wisdom of Diognetus, withdrew with his fleet.17
This Diognetus was apparently a Rhodian architect, though he is not mentioned by Diodorus. Vitruvius goes on to say that the helepolis was eventually dragged into the city and set up in a public place in honour of Diognetus.
Demetrius determined on one final effort. He organized his best men for a risky, but potentially-decisive, night escalade. To attempt this surprise assault, 1,500 soldiers were picked and given instructions to establish a foothold in the city where the rest of the army could follow. Utilizing a breach in the battered walls, the stratagem nearly worked, as initially the Rhodian guards were overpowered and the attackers managed to reach the theatre in the city itself. There they were halted and counterattacked by the recently-arrived reinforcements from Ptolemy. Trapped, their only hope was rescue by the main army, but Demetrius could not reach them and eventually all were killed or captured after heroic resistance.
Antigonus, at last, intervened and ordered his son to make peace with the brave islanders. Demetrius was reluctant, his personal prestige was bound up in the enterprise, but he did comply. To the very end, he never faltered in his obedience to his ageing autocratic father. The arrival of an Aetolian delegation served as the rationale, urging him to come to Greece to oppose Cassander. They were not the first people to plead for his intervention in Greece during the siege, but this latest arrival allowed the fact of his defeat to be shrouded as an act of policy. The peace terms agreed left no doubt about who had prevailed. The treaty between the republic and the Antigonids specifically excluded any duty on the island’s people to take up arms against Ptolemy.
One wonders whether Demetrius’ penchant for bigger and better machinery, which in the end seemed to undermine their functionality, was an aspect of his personality. Diodorus records that he was ‘exceedingly ready in invention and devising many things beyond the art of the master builders’ and the machines used at Rhodes seem almost ludicrous in their grandiose size and need for so many men to operate them.18 A pertinent reminder of this is the fact that in the nearly 2,500 years since the siege of Rhodes, no larger machine has ever even been contemplated, much less constructed. Our modern day and age and its penchant for cod psychology would have had a field day with Demetrius and (like Alexander) his need, perhaps, to outdo his father. Furthermore, one can only speculate that his epithet, Poliorcetes (Besieger), may have been bestowed on him ironically, given the ultimate lack of success he actually had in this his most famous siege.
It was a rare enough event that a free city should fight off the ambitions of one of the Macedonian powers. But, this was only the opening turn for Rhodes as a great player in the east Mediterranean world. In centuries to come, they would both dominate trade at sea and contribute to sucking Rome into the Hellenistic orbit (they had already made a treaty with them in 306 BC); an intrusion that would eventually bring down cat
astrophe on the heads of the great dynasties that were riding so high at the end of the fourth century.
What is immediately apparent about these two detailed examples of the art of siege warfare in the era of the Diadochi, is that they both ended in failure. This despite, on both occasions, the attackers having great forces at their command; the resources first of a kingdom and second a powerful empire were thrown against two cities that were, if not insignificant, certainly not of the first rank. But, in both cases the attacker failed even though the Macedonians had made great strides in giving the offensive the advantage. New techniques and a new determination certainly seem evident throughout Alexander’s career and beyond. At Tyre, a great mole was built to connect the mainland with the island city so towers and rams could be brought across to get at the walls; catapults were shipped onto triremes to get in range of the defenders. Later at Gaza, ramps were built to get to a city built high on its tell, and then batteries of catapults, towers and miners were brought up to bring down the walls. Not that these were easy victories, the defenders, in most cases, would break out to contest the day trying to set fire to the machines and put back the attackers’ enterprises as far as they could. But, still, whether it was a classic escalade or some bizarre ruse, as when Alexander sent his specialist climbers to get above the defences of the Sogdian rock, success was usually the result.
But then, as always the dialectic, techniques of defence were advanced and when the protagonists of protection took up the cudgel they were able to use many of the same advances that the attackers had pioneered. There is even a suggestion that the art of siege warfare reached in the Hellenistic era was a kind of balance between the attacker and defender, that defence had caught up with attack.19 That is to say that the initial impetus given by the introduction of torsion weapons and the use of great siege towers and sophisticated engineering techniques had been countered in defence by more advanced wall and gate design and the deployment of catapults and ballistae in defence, with the end result that the defenders could keep the attackers at a distance where they could have less impact.
Certainly the affairs of Megalopolis and Rhodes seem to bear this out. Huge resources were brought to bear but, even if it was frequently touch and go, the defences survived in a way they seldom seemed to do when Philip or Alexander were at the gates. And, other great sieges seem to give more support to this contention. The very first war of the post-Alexandrine world centred round the siege of Lamia, which after an initial attempt at assault resolved itself into a blockade that saw the army of Antipater trapped and enduring a winter in the one city in the region that stood by the Macedonian cause. Similarly at Pydna in 317/316 BC, it took a winter season cut off from supplies and support to bring the end for Olympias, hunkering down there with her freezing elephants. Again, though we know little of the details, Antigonus spent years on his siege of Tyre and, in the end, needed to build a navy to achieve the consummation he craved by starving the people into submission. So different from Alexander the Great who, though he too endured a long siege of Tyre, eventually ended it by bloody escalade.
Equally, after the turn of the century, Athens and Thebes stood up to a number of enemies and if not always with success, at least with a resolution that meant the process was extremely time-consuming for their assailant. In Demetrius’ siege of Athens in 294 BC it is no happenstance that the one main event we hear of is Ptolemy’s admiral and his mercenaries aiding the Athenians getting the harvest in to prepare for the siege. Indeed a most dramatic detail of the impact of blockade comes from this time:
Among many examples of the extremities, to which they had been reduced, it happened that a father and son were sitting in a room and had abandoned all hope that they could survive. Suddenly a dead mouse fell from the ceiling and as soon as the two saw it, they sprang up and began to fight for the prize. It was at this time too, we are told, that the philosopher Epicurus kept his disciples alive with beans, counting out and distributing a ration for them each day.20
Yet this list of failed affairs or ones brought to conclusion by starvation is far from exhaustive and in a way tells a misleading story. In the twenty-plus years of war after Alexander’s death (where we are privy to some good detail of what befell) the picture is not apiece with this contention at all. Cities large and small fell or changed allegiance with surprising rapidity, not in every case but enough to make us reconsider what is happening. Campaigns in the Peloponnese are very illustrative on this point. As often as not, towns in that region seem to fall at the arrival of armies outside their gates. In 314 BC, Alexander, son of Polyperchon, might be rebuffed at Elis but Aristodemus, with a mercenary army fighting for the Antigonid cause, had no trouble taking control at Patrae and Aegium on the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. Nor does Alexander have to spend much time to get back control of Dyme when he goes on the counterattack. And, then with equal felicity Aristodemus’ mercenaries return and take the place back from Alexander’s people. No doubt the thing would have gone on ad nauseam if Alexander had not been assassinated by disgruntled citizens of Sicyon.
The Peloponnese saw the likes of Cassander, Polyperchon, Alexander, Aristodemus and their agents shooting around like billiard balls from one town after another, starving them into surrender, taking them by escalade or, as often as not, being let in by disaffected citizens, who, currently not at the top of the communal pile, hoped for promotion of their ambitions with the sponsorship of the attacking force. Similar things occurred elsewhere. Antigonus came back from his great battles in the upper satrapies intent on ensuring control of the Levant and establishing himself as a great sea power. He took over two years to take Tyre, the great Phoenician port city on its island stronghold, but while it was going on Antigonus also sent off detachments to take Gaza and Joppa which fell with no such trouble at all. After that, the Antigonid machine descended on Anatolia. No rival there had an army that could face them so the campaigns became an itinerary of cities that fell through storm, treason or starvation. Arrhidaeus in Hellespontine Phrygia saw his friends and allies either go over to, or be taken over by, the Antigonid war machine that came at them by land and sea. Asander, satrap of Caria, fared the same, great cities whose pedigree in culture and science went back centuries were taken with apparent ease. Miletus, so important in her time, did not hold out long. Caunus, which Antigonus intended to use as a major naval base, fell to assault but we know no details. Often we hear that towns are sold by citizens and the garrisons repair to the citadel where they try to hold out. Yet none of this seems to delay Antigonus to any great extent, certainly not in the manner he had experienced at Tyre.
Again we have Seleucus in Cyprus in 315 BC as he cruises the coast of that island, on behalf of Ptolemy of Egypt, capturing city after city with no great apparent effort until the end of the season when Citium endures a siege that we do not actually know the outcome of. This preparedness to come to terms surely cannot be because of confident expectation of good treatment from someone who got his orders from the man in Alexandria, Ptolemy, who, a little later, ordered the complete extermination of the old city of Marion on the northern coast of Cyprus.
Then we have Demetrius, unsuppressed by his failure at Rhodes, cutting a swathe through the strongholds of the Peloponnese. He even rolled into the extraordinarily-defensible Acrocorinth. Sicyon had fallen just before and Orchomenus succumbed to an assault driven by Demetrius’ bile that had been stimulated by being insulted by the garrison. Still, later, in the campaigns before Ipsus, strongholds like Abydos, Ephesus, Synnada and Sardis fell like ninepins to one side or the other as Lysimachus and Prepelaus first prised away Antigonid control and then Demetrius returned to reassert it.
But, what happened on these occasions had less to do with technology than the inclination and determination of the defenders. Very frequently our sources attest that citizens sold the pass and that, as often as not, their reward was to rough up their political opponents in frequently-lethal manner, even when they had fled to temples fo
r protection. None of this was new. Communal rivalry was the lifeblood of these cities, big and small. Aristocrats contended with democratic opponents with words or swords, whichever was appropriate at the time. These local rivalries could be played on by any outsider who cared to. Alexander had favoured democrats in Asia Minor because the Persians had usually ruled through oligarchs, while his viceroy, Antipater, in Europe, based his own power on those same oligarchs who happily exiled democratic opponents to sustain their regimes. These kings could also change their minds if it suited them. Alexander did a volte-face in Greece at the end of his life; his Exiles Decree would have brought back into contention, if not power, the very people who had lost everything while Antipater ruled.
Polyperchon then carried on the process with his decree of Greek freedom that was meant to undermine the oligarchic regimes that would have supported the son, Cassander, as they had the father, Antipater. Antigonus, at his camp near Tyre, repeated the mantra and all the Diadochi would bang on about freedoms they would never really give their own subjects but were happy to decree elsewhere as long as it caused problems for their rivals. What this meant is that, in so many of these campaigns, particularly in the Peloponnese but also in Asia and elsewhere too, an attacker was let in by the local party that was out of power.
If the towns were garrisoned, the soldiers would often retreat to the citadel to try and hold out as they would usually not have the numbers to hold the walls when not seconded by the populace. But these attempts at resistance often ended quickly enough, with mercenaries seldom sufficiently committed to risk too much against an enemy that might soon turn into another employer. So the riven politics of these Greek communities made them vulnerable in a way that made it pretty irrelevant how powerful were the torsion catapults and how huge the towers and battering rams of the attacker.