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Archimedes before his death with a Roman soldier – copy of a Roman mosaic from the 2nd century. Marcus Claudius Marcellus had ordered that Archimedes, the well-known mathematician – and possibly equally well-known to Marcellus as the inventor of the mechanical devices that had so dominated the siege – should not be killed. Archimedes, who ...
According to Valerius Maximus, the phrase was uttered by the ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer Archimedes. When the Romans conquered the city of Syracuse after the siege of 214–212 BC, the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus gave the order to retrieve Archimedes. Some soldiers entered the house of Archimedes and one of the ...
Archimedes died during the siege of Syracuse, when he was killed by a Roman soldier despite orders that he should not be harmed. Cicero describes visiting Archimedes' tomb, which was surmounted by a sphere and a cylinder that Archimedes requested be placed there to represent his most valued mathematical discovery.
The Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC) was the second of three wars fought between Carthage and Rome, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC. For 17 years the two states struggled for supremacy, primarily in Italy and Iberia, but also on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia and, towards the end of the war, in North Africa.
The Roman withdrawal from Africa was the attempt by the Roman Republic in 255 BC to rescue the survivors of their defeated expeditionary force to Carthaginian Africa during the First Punic War. A large fleet commanded by Servius Fulvius Paetinus Nobilior and Marcus Aemilius Paullus successfully evacuated the survivors after defeating an ...
Romans referred to sub-Saharan Africa as Aethiopia (Ethiopia), which referred to the people's "burned" skin. They also had available memoirs of the ancient Carthage explorer, Hanno the Navigator, being referenced by the Roman Pliny the Elder (c. 23–79) [2] and the Greek Arrian of Nicomedia (c. 86–160). [3]
Archimedes is purported to have invented a large scale solar furnace, sometimes described as a heat ray, and used it to burn attacking Roman ships during the Siege of Syracuse (c. 213–212 BC). It does not appear in the surviving works of Archimedes and there is no contemporary evidence for it, leading to modern scholars doubting its existence.
Old Africa (Africa Vetus), which generally includes the areas mentioned, was also known by the Romans (Pliny) as Africa propria, [9] [10] of which Carthage was the capital. [11] The region remained a part of the Roman empire until the Germanic migrations of the 5th century.