Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ancient Warfare podcast.

With me today is a whole team of people to discuss the latest issue of the magazine,

which is all about sieges.

And with me today are Mark DeSantis, Marrydam, Lindsay Powell, Mark McCaffrey, and Mike Cole.

It's a big topic, and we have a lot of questions. So I think I'm just

going to pick one and throw it up in the air, see who catches it. Let's start talking because

he's mentioned twice. It's one fun aspect that goes with siege. It's a siege equipment and sort of defensive siege equipment and the

most famous one of those are of course the devices that archimedes is supposed to have

developed to help defend Syracuse who wants to um i think we talked about it before in the past of the magazine.

Who wants to take a punt at that?

This isn't quite an answer to the question, but I always am worried of, I brought up when we were pre-gaming for this.

If I'm pronouncing correctly, Helopoulos, which is the city destroying siege tower that Demetrius Polyarkete is supposedly built to take

on roads in the Hellenistic era. These kinds of dramatic things, Archimedes, defensive engines,

they kind of raise my alarms for things like Hellenistic myth making. They seem so spectacular and so complex.

And also the way they're constructed in the narrative on a dramatic arc, and I say this as a novelist,

you see a lot of playing fast and loose with narratives in Hellenistic reporting.

So I always get wary of it.

And let me contrast this with siege reporting of defensive measures that I would consider

to have much more have the ring of truth.

And this is Thucydides' description of Archadamus' siege of Plataea.

I believe this is in the fifth century BC, if folks remember.

And there is a very, very intimate description

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