Siege Weapons In Ancient Greece

Ancient Greeks and their use of mathematics to construct siege weapons and artillery.

Stephen Devenney
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1 Introduction
Ancient Greece was a time of innovation. Their findings in multiple areas of technology established an age of science where numerous discoveries contributed to modern day discoveries and inventions. Examples of these would include the alarm clock which was invented by Ctesibius who was a Greek engineer, physicist and mathematician (Oleson 2009, p.753). The device worked by dropping peddles onto a gong at a set time. Another example would be the odometer which was a device to measure distance. The odometer consisted of a number of screws, gears and axles in a box and worked by tracking the number of rotations of a chariot wheel. Different gears correlated to a different number of rotations made by the chariot wheel so a rotation of the last gear in the box was equivalent to 216000 revolutions of the chariot wheel which would be 1080 kilometres depending on the diameter of the wheel (Oleson 2009, p.806).

In terms of military technology, siege machines were not used by the ancient Greeks until the fifth century BC where “Dionysius 1 became acquainted with siege warfare while waging war with

“The invention of borers is credited to Diades, who was an engineer in the service of Alexander the Great” (Nossov 2012, p.99). The need for a device to break down a brick wall led to this invention by Diades, as battering rams were not very effective against it. Diades’s borer had a wooden bed with a trench inside for a log which lay on a number of rollers, the log itself was either sharpened or had an iron head on it for drilling and was around 25 metres long (Campbell 2003, p.18). The function of the trench ensured the ramming log would hit the same spot