Siege of Syracuse (213–212 BCE)

From the spring of 213 BC to the autumn of 212 BC, a Roman army and fleet besieged the Greek city of Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily, which had broken with Rome and sided with Carthage during the Second Punic War. The defenders held out for many months, helped by the machines of the mathematician Archimedes, but the city finally fell, was sacked, and Rome gained control of all of Sicily. Archimedes was killed in the capture.

Rome had taken Sicily from Carthaginian control in the First Punic War, which ended in 241 BC, and the island became its first province outside Italy. Syracuse, in the south-east, kept its independence as a kingdom and remained a close Roman ally during the long reign of Hiero II. When Hiero died in 215 BC, his grandson Hieronymus succeeded him, and an anti-Roman faction gained influence at court.

Hieronymus was assassinated, but the new republican government came under pressure as Rome reacted with threats to the prospect of Syracuse joining Carthage. Fighting began in 214 BC, at a time when Rome was still struggling against Hannibal in Italy. Two brothers, Hippocrates and Epicydes, who had served with Hannibal, seized control of the city for the pro-Carthaginian side and made themselves its rulers.

In 213 BC the proconsul Marcus Claudius Marcellus, with the propraetor Appius Claudius Pulcher, attacked the city by land and sea. Syracuse was protected by strong walls, and the Romans brought special equipment, including the sambuca, a siege tower carried on ships, and ladders lowered from ships onto the walls by pulleys.

Inside the city, Archimedes designed defences to meet them. The most famous was a crane fitted with a hook, the so-called Claw of Archimedes, which could lift Roman ships out of the water and drop them. A later legend says he also set ships alight by concentrating sunlight with mirrors. Together with missile engines on the walls, these devices forced the Romans into costly assaults that failed.

The siege settled into a deadlock. The Romans could neither break in nor fully cut off supplies, and the Syracusans could not drive them away. A Carthaginian relief attempt was beaten back, and Carthage, also fighting in Spain, could not spare the forces for another, although it did get supplies into the city. Meanwhile a Carthaginian army under Himilco took several Sicilian towns, including Agrigentum, while the Romans were tied down at Syracuse.

In 212 BC the Romans learned that the city would be celebrating a festival of Artemis. Under cover of darkness a small party climbed the walls and, once reinforced, took the outer city, although the inner citadel held out. According to the traditional story, Marcellus had ordered that Archimedes be spared, but a soldier who did not recognise him killed him after the old man, then about 78, told him to go away.

The inner city was cut off and starved over a further eight months, until an Iberian officer among the defenders, Moeriscus, let the Romans in through a gate. Marcellus protected the houses of the pro-Roman party and allowed the rest of the city to be plundered. Many inhabitants were killed and most of the others enslaved.

By 210 BC the whole island was a Roman province. Losing Syracuse denied Carthage a base in Sicily from which to support Hannibal, and Rome later used the island as a springboard for its final campaign in Africa. Syracuse was rebuilt and remained an important city of the Roman Empire into the 5th century AD.

Our 200 BCE map shows Sicily within the Roman Republic shortly after the siege, during the closing years of the Punic Wars; the 300 BCE map shows the island before Roman rule.