crane, which grappled the prows of ships, then lifted them into the air and let them fall again.

Marcellus is said to have derided his own engineers and artificers with the words, “Shall we not make an end of fighting with this geometrical Briareus who uses our ships like cups to ladle water from the sea, drives our sambuca off ignominiously with cudgel-blows, and, by the multitude of missiles that he hurls at us all at once, outdoes the hundred-handed giants of mythology?”

But the exhortation had no effect, the Romans being in such abject terror that, “if they did but see a piece of rope or wood projecting above the wall they would cry ‘there it is,’ declaring that Archimedes was setting some engine in motion against them, and would turn their backs and run away, insomuch that Marcellus desisted from all fighting and assault, putting all his hope in a long siege”.

Archimedes died, as he had lived, absorbed in mathematical contemplation. The accounts of the circumstances of his death differ in some details. Plutarch gives more than one version in the following passage: “Marcellus was most of all afflicted at the death of Archimedes, for, as fate would have it, he was intent on working out some problem with a diagram, and, his mind and his eyes being alike fixed on his investigation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans nor the capture of the city. And when a soldier came up to him suddenly and bade him follow to Marcellus, he refused to do so until he had worked out his problem to a demonstration; whereat the soldier was so enraged that he drew his sword and slew him. Others say that

the Roman ran up to him with a drawn sword, threatening to kill him; and, when Archimedes saw him, he begged him earnestly to wait a little while in order that he might not leave his problem incomplete and unsolved, but