The Roman General Who Conquered Syracuse and Wept When His Soldier Killed Archimedes

Marcus Claudius Marcellus (c. 268–208 BC) was elected Roman consul five times — a record matched in the Roman Republican period only by Marius. His military career spanned the substantive crisis of the Second Punic War; he was the senior Roman field commander who substantively held the line against Hannibal in central Italy through the worst phase of the war (after the catastrophic Roman defeat at Cannae in 216 BC); and he was substantively the most successful Roman general of the period after Scipio Africanus.

His most famous individual action was the capture of Syracuse in 212 BC after a two-year siege.

The siege

Syracuse had been a Roman ally throughout the previous century. The young king Hieronymus, who succeeded the long-reigning Hiero II in 215 BC, abruptly switched the city’s allegiance to Hannibal in 214 BC. The Romans responded with a substantial military and naval expedition under Marcellus’s command. The siege opened in spring 214 BC with combined land and sea assaults on the substantially fortified Hellenistic city.

The obstacle to Roman success was Archimedes, then approximately 73 years old and the senior engineering adviser to the Syracusan defence. Archimedes had designed a portfolio of defensive war machines — counterweighted siege catapults, long-range stone-throwers, the substantive Iron Hand crane mechanism that could lift attacking ships out of the water and drop them — that defeated the initial Roman assaults and forced Marcellus into a two-year passive siege.

The substantive Roman reaction was substantively rueful admiration. Plutarch records that Marcellus told his officers: “Let us stop fighting against this geometrical Briareus, who uses our ships like cups to ladle water from the sea.” The Iron Hand machinery had become a substantive Roman naval-engineering nightmare.

The fall

The Syracusan defence eventually collapsed through interior treachery rather than direct Roman military breakthrough. During the festival of Artemis in autumn 212 BC, a Roman force scaled the Epipolae plateau on the city’s western edge — guided by a party of pro-Roman Syracusan exiles — and entered the city through an inadequately-guarded postern. The outer fortified districts fell to the Romans within hours; the inner Achradina district held out for several more days; the citadel on Ortygia was the last position to surrender.

Marcellus had given advance orders that the city was to be preserved and that the population was not to be subjected to general massacre. The orders were substantively not fully obeyed by his soldiers — looting and individual violence followed the fall — but the city was spared the worst of the substantive Punic-war-period sacks (the Roman destruction of Capua and Tarentum in the same war was worse).

What happened to Archimedes

Marcellus had given specific orders that Archimedes was to be taken alive and brought to him unharmed. The orders were not obeyed. According to the Plutarch account, a Roman soldier entered the workshop where Archimedes was working on a geometrical diagram in the sand. Archimedes refused to leave the diagram until he had finished the proof — the reported last words were Noli turbare circulos meos (‘Do not disturb my circles’). The soldier ran him through.

Marcellus was angered when the substantive news reached him. He wept publicly; he ordered the soldier substantively punished (Plutarch does not record the nature of the punishment); he had Archimedes substantively buried with full Greek-philosophical honours at the Syracusan family-tomb site outside the Agrigentine Gate. He personally located and protected Archimedes’s substantive surviving relatives.

The gesture mattered to the subsequent Roman intellectual tradition. The substantive Marcellus-Archimedes episode became the substantive template for the Roman culture-hero — the successful general who substantively reveres the Greek mathematical and philosophical tradition even when killing it. Cicero would extend the same gesture 137 years later by finding and restoring the forgotten tomb.

What happened to Marcellus

Marcellus served two further consulships after the Syracuse campaign. He was substantively killed in a cavalry skirmish near Venusia in southern Italy in 208 BC, ambushed by a Numidian patrol of Hannibal’s. The body was substantively recovered by Hannibal’s own forces, substantively cremated with full military honours, and the ashes substantively returned to the Roman lines. The gesture was substantively a Hannibalic mirror of Marcellus’s earlier treatment of Archimedes — substantively the Roman tradition that you substantively buried your defeated military equals with honour.

The Marcellus family produced senior Roman magistrates for the next two centuries. The gens Claudia Marcella substantively eventually produced the substantive young Marcellus whom Augustus substantively adopted as his first intended heir in the 20s BC — substantively dead at 19, the subject of Virgil’s famous tu Marcellus eris lament in Aeneid VI.