Archimedes and the Design of Euryalus Fort

The argument of this paper is that the fort on the Euryalus at Syracuse was modernised by Archimedes, who is recorded to have been the chief military engineer or scientific adviser to his native city before and during the siege by the Romans. The fort lay outside the populated area of Syracuse though within the walls. The town had originally been confined to an island between the two harbours, but soon extended on to the mainland of Sicily; the ground to the west was swampy, hence the suburbs necessarily spread up the Epipolae hill to the north. This hill forms a tilted plateau, 3½ miles long, which slopes towards the island, but is surrounded elsewhere by a cliff, except at the inland extremity where it joins on to higher country. Since the cliff afforded a strong line of defence, the town walls were eventually carried all round the edge of the plateau, making them 17 miles in circuit. This great extension was the work of the tyrant Dionysius I, in the year 402 and later; the need for it had been demonstrated twelve years earlier, when the Athenians captured the plateau and almost starved the town into surrender. The strongest part of the fortifications was necessarily at the inland extremity of the plateau, the one place where nature provided no obstacles. Here the highest ground runs off to the west in a ridge that rises into two gentle mounds, one of which was called Euryalus, meaning the ‘wide nail’ (or wart). The town-walls included only one of these summits, and upon it stands the fort in question, overlooking one of the main gateways of the city.