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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 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.
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 Claw of Archimedes (Ancient Greek: Ἁρπάγη, romanized: harpágē, lit. 'snatcher'; also known as the iron hand ) was an ancient weapon devised by Archimedes to defend the seaward portion of Syracuse 's city wall against amphibious assault .
The Romans used three main siege techniques to seize enemy cities: by starvation (it took more time, but less loss of life on the part of the attackers), by creating all around the besieged city a series of fortifications (an inner [4] and sometimes an outer contravallation, [5] as in the case of Alesia) [6] that would prevent the enemy from obtaining supplies (of food and even water, by ...
Greek mathematics [a] reached its acme during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, and much of the work represented by authors such as Euclid (fl. 300 BC), Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC), Apollonius (c. 240–190 BC), Hipparchus (c. 190–120 BC), and Ptolemy (c. 100–170 AD) was of a very advanced level and rarely mastered outside a small ...
In addition, after the consulship had been opened to the plebeians, the plebs acquired a de facto right to hold both the Roman dictatorship and the Roman censorship [6] since only former consuls could hold either office. 356 BC saw the appointment of the first plebeian dictator, [13] and in 339 BC the plebeians facilitated the passage of a law ...