The Impossible Siege of Syracuse – Second Punic War

Spring 213 BC. The great harbor of Syracuse, Sicily. 60 Roman warships are moving on one of the richest Greek cities in the world. At their head sails Marcus Claudius Marcelus, the most decorated soldier Rome has. Rome is still bleeding from Cany, and this campaign may decide who controls Sicily.

 But today, Marcelus is not sailing toward a battle. He is rowing into a machine. [screaming] >> No engine built by men throws that far. >> Every engine has a limit. >> Full stroke. >> Eight ships lashed in pairs carry Rome’s answer to the walls. Four floating siege towers. Their ladders will fall onto the parapet and hundreds of soldiers will storm the ramparts.

 Syracuse has no fleet to stop them. It does not need one. The Romans close the distance, expecting to pass beneath the reach of the great catapults. Instead, smaller engines take over. Every range is covered. Every step forward brings the fleet into the aim of another weapon. >> We’re losing ships. WE MUST PULL BACK. NO. SOUND THE ADVANCE AGAIN.

 THE SAFEST WATER IS UNDER THAT WALL. >> The horns sound [music] and the survivors drive for the wall. Archers and slingers on every deck raking the parapet, forcing the defenders down. The lead sambuka cranks its ladder upright. For one breath, the plan is working. [groaning and screaming] Then a long timber arm swings out above the parapet, a block of stone hanging from its end.

 It stops over the lead sambuka and drops. The tower comes apart in one blow. >> It’s the gods. >> Gods don’t need chains, BOY. >> EYES UP. EYES UP. THE horns sound again. This time the retreat. The fleet backs oarses out of range. [music] Ragged on the walls. There is no cheering. Only timber arms swinging slowly back into position.

Resetting. Find out who builds their engines. I want his name. The Sicilian prisoners already gave it, general. They say it is one man, a Gometric, 70 years old. His name is Archimedes. Marcelus has fought Gauls, Carthaginians, and Hannibal himself. Every wall he has attacked has fallen. Until today, Rome cannot hold Sicily while Syracuse stands.

 And now it will need another way in. For nearly half a century, Syracuse has been Rome’s most loyal ally in Sicily. Its king, Hero II, remained faithful even after Ka when much of southern Italy abandoned Rome. Then in 215 BC, Hero dies at almost 90. The crown passes to his grandson, Heronomus, 15 years old, sitting on a throne built for a statesman.

Carthage offers the boy what Rome never would. Rome’s power died at Carne, Majesty. Carthage asks only your friendship, and in return, Sicily, all of it, yours. >> And Rome, what does Rome offer? Rome asks that you honor your grandfather’s treaty. Nothing more. >> My grandfather is dead. But tell me first, how did your legions fair at [music] CA? I hear the accounts differ.

>> The Alliance dies that day. 13 months later, officers murder Heronomous in a narrow street at Leontini. Syracuse collapses into riots, purges, and counter coups. When elections are finally held, the city chooses Hypocrates and Epicites, Hannibal’s own officers, as its generals. Rome answers with Marcellus.

 He storms Leontini in a single morning, but the brothers escape. They reach 8,000 Syracuse soldiers outside the town and tell them Rome massacred every inhabitant. It is a lie, but it works. The army turns back towards Syracuse, convinced that surrender means death. In the spring of 213 BC, Marcellus arrives with a fleet and more than 20,000 men.

 His officers expect the rebellion to end within days. They are marching against the greatest fortress circuit in the Greek world. Defended by weapons built decades before any Roman appeared. Built by the mind of a single man, Archimedes of Syracuse, kinsman of the old king and the greatest mathematician of the ancient world.

Years earlier, Hero commissioned him to prepare Syracuse for a war he hoped would never come. Archimedes treated every section of wall as a problem of distance, weight, and angle. Catapults, I understand, old man, but half my walls are pierced with holes. You have cut holes in my walls. >> Every stone of that wall is a number.

Every engine [music] is set to a range and every range overlaps the next. From the horizon to the foot of the wall, there is no place where a Roman can stand and not be struck. Your soldiers need only one discipline. Trust the machines. Outside, Marcelus divides the attack. To follow it, see the city as he saw it.

Ortigia is the royal island. Acredina guards the sea. Above them stretches the plateau of Epipholy. The northern road enters through the Hexapolon. Aius Claudius will attack the northern wall by land. Marcelus will strike Acredina from the sea. Both assaults will begin at dawn. Among the land force march survivors of Cany, [music] exiled to Sicily until the war is won.

 They ask for the front of the assault. Rome gives it to them. At dawn, the survivors of Cany lead the assault on the Hexapalon. Stones smash gaps through their shield roofs, but the veterans press closer. They expect the great engines above to become useless at the foot of the wall. They are wrong. Archimedes has prepared for the blind spot beneath the walls.

Spearlength bolts tear through shields. Hidden slots open at knee and chest height. and scorpions fire point blank. Beams and blocks crash down from above. The ladders never touch the stone. By nightfall, both assaults have failed. Rome has lost ships, engines, and hundreds of men without placing one soldier on the wall.

 Syracuse has lost almost no one. >> One old man and his machines hold those walls. I am done feeding him Romans. Then how do we take the city? >> Machines do not eat. Cities do. Seal the roads seal the sea. The assault becomes a blockade around Roman campfires. [music] The machines grow into legend. Claws that lift ships and mirrors said to burn sails with sunlight.

 The mirrors are almost certainly a later invention. The fear is real. But Syracuse is not alone. Carthage lands an army in Sicily, 25,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry, and 12 elephants under him. At sea, the Admiral Bumlcar slips 55 warships through the blockade. The city eats. Marcelus is now racing an army outside the walls and supplies moving through them. Himloo’s arrival changes the war.

The [music] brothers divide their army. Epicides keeps enough men inside Syracuse to hold the walls, while Hypocrates slips through the Roman lines at night to join Himlco. Himloo avoids a decisive engagement. >> General, I found a way in through the wall. I counted the blocks during the prisoner talks.

 Below the Galagra, the wall is lower than we believed. Ordinary ladders can reach it. Then build them. But that section is guarded every night. >> Not every night. A deserter reports that Syracuse is holding a 3-day festival for Artemis and Epicides has distributed wine throughout the city. Marcelus waits until the guards are drunk and asleep.

Now under cover of darkness, a thousand picked Romans climb beneath the Galiagra. They move along the rampart tower by tower toward the hexapalon. Their mission is to open the gate and let the main army into Syracuse before the city wakes. At dawn, Roman trumpets sound from the heights of Epipili.

 Epicides rushes out, expecting a small raiding party and finds the Roman army coming downhill. He escapes behind Acredina’s inner walls. Within days, isolated and surrounded, Epiples surrenders. After more than a year of humiliation, the greatest wall in the Greek world has fallen to a ladder, a festival, and a man counting stones.

But the siege is not over. Acredina and Ortigia still hold, supplied from the sea. South of the harbor, Himilkco and Hypocrates return with the relief army. Rome has entered Syracuse and is now trapped between the city and Carthage. Marcelus holds the high city. [music] Epicides holds the sea forts below. Himlco holds the plane.

 The Roman fleet holds the bay. And still the grain gets through. [music] Rome is inside Syracuse and surrounded. >> Whose fires are those? Past the marsh. >> Carthage. 20,000 at least. We besieged a city. Now count what’s besieging us. If they strike from the city and the plane at once, they will. But these engines are ours now.

At dawn, they strike together. Epicides attacks from inside the city. Himloo advances from the plane and Rome defends the ground it has captured with Syracuse’s own weapons. [screaming] In the end, both attacks have failed. Himloo pulls his army back from the Roman- held walls. He will not try to force them again.

 Instead, he settles beside the marshes and waits for another opening. The fortress [music] still stands. The siege grinds on. Then summer comes down on the marshes where Himlco’s army is camped. Week after week of heat over standing water. They’re fires. Every night there are fewer. >> What is putting them out? The answer is in the water.

 Fever out of the stagnant marsh. It moves through the tents faster than any assault. It kills Hypocrates. Days later, it kills Himlco. The army that came to save Syracuse is [music] dying in its own camp. It reaches the Romans, too. But the Romans have the city. roofs, stone streets, distance from the marsh. The army outside has only the swamp.

Rome buries men. Himloo’s camp buries an army. With Himlco’s army gone, Rome turns everything on what is left of Syracuse. The fortress by the sea. The watch on the water tightens. And inside the grain begins to run out. Then a ray of hope. A massive Carthaginian fleet sighted from the walls. >> Count them. 130 warships.

 And behind them transports hundreds grain ships. Then we are not dead yet. >> The news crosses the bay in minutes. Marcellus leaves the city to his officers and takes to the fleet. 130 of them. 100 of us. I know. If that grain gets in, this siege lasts years. And Rome [music] does not have years. Form the line. Straight at them.

>> South of the city, the two fleets sight each other. And stop. The wind is up. Too rough to fight. For two days, they ride the swell inside of each other, waiting. On the third morning, the wind dies, and from the walls, they see the white line begin to move. >> They’re underway. They’re coming. >> No. Look at They’re heading.

>> Where are they going? Why would they? They’re leaving. They’re leaving us. Bamlcar turns his fleet around and never fights. The grain ships turn back for Africa. Not one sack reaches Syracuse. Why he turned with more ships than Rome, historians still debate it to this day. And Epicides, who sailed out to meet that fleet, never comes back.

Syracuse now has no army coming, no fleet, no commander, no food, only walls. After that, the last defenders lose all hope. In the days that follow, Ortigia falls. Acredina, leaderless, opens its gates. After a year and a half, it is over. Marcelus gives two orders. No citizen is to be harmed.

 And one man, one is to be found alive. >> Do not disturb my circles. >> That is the end of Archimedes, the greatest mind of the ancient world. Days later, Marcelus buries him with honors beneath a stone that carries no titles and no machines. Only the figure, the theorem he loved most, a sphere inside a cylinder. With Syracuse taken, the war moves west to Spain. And there Rome is losing.

 Two Roman armies are destroyed together. their commanders, two brothers named Scipio, dead weeks [music] apart. In their place, Rome sends a young man in his mid20s carrying the same name, Scipio, son of one dead general, nephew of the other. He sails for Spain to avenge them. His first target, New Carthage, the capital of Carthage’s empire in Spain.

 Sea in front, a lagoon behind, one narrow road in, and three Carthaginian armies close enough to crush any siege. Rome cannot take this city in a year. He means to take it in a day. Watch it now.