This article from the New York Times is somewhat interesting:
How Catapults Married Sciences With Politics
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: February 24, 2004
In wars of antiquity, no weapon struck greater terror than the catapult. It was the heavy artillery of that day, the sturdy springboard that shot menacing payloads over fortress walls and into enemy camps — flaming missiles, diseased corpses, lethal arrows and stony projectiles.
For centuries on end, at least until the proliferation of gunpowder in the 15th-century West, catapults saw action as the early weapons of mass destruction. They were prized assets in an arms race and had profound effects on affairs of state. Sound familiar?
Perhaps that is why a small but growing number of historians and classics scholars are taking a closer look at the role of catapults not only in warfare, but also the politics of antiquity. Out of their careful re-reading of old texts, combined with archaeological finds, has emerged a revised view of the convergence of science and political power in earlier times.
More than had been generally recognized, scholars are finding, such weapons drew on advances of science, elevated the influence and prestige of technologists and engendered ambivalent feelings of strength through might, as well a greater vulnerability — even a diminished humanity — than in past hand-to-hand combat with traditional swords and spears.
The changing interpretation was forcefully expressed in a recent essay by Dr. Serafina Cuomo, a British historian of science. She challenged a stereotype that in antiquity "theory and practice were on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide and that science and technology were marginal in ancient society."
A study of catapults, Dr. Cuomo, of the Imperial College London, wrote in the Feb. 6 issue of the journal Science, "shows that such a divide did not exist in reality" and that "both engineers and their achievements were an important part of ancient society."
Dr. Cuomo cited several telling examples from Greek and Roman history in which rulers employed scientists for their knowledge of geometry, physics and engineering skills in developing more powerful and reliable catapults. Dionysius, a king of Syracuse in the fourth century B.C., gathered craftsmen "from everywhere into one place," as Diodorus wrote, and rewarded them with high wages, gifts, prizes and, for the best and brightest, places at his table.
Dr. Cuomo called it "an inspiring example of policy-driven research."
Later in the same century, catapult designers working for Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, raised the stakes in the arms race by improving the weapon with twisted sinews and ropes that acted as powerful springs. By 200 B.C., Philo of Byzantium was writing that catapult research had moved beyond trial-and-error methods to the recognition of a principle based on mathematics.
The principle, as Dr. Cuomo pointed out, was that "all parts of a catapult, including the weight or length of the projectile, were proportional to the size of the torsion springs." Mathematicians were then able to draw up precise tables of specifications for easy reference by builders, and also soldiers on the firing line.
The engineer Philo, the earliest direct source on this period of catapult design, reported that the improved weapons were something that ambitious rulers in the Mediterranean region "display the greatest enthusiasm over and would exchange anything for." Scientists and engineers, he said, were paid handsomely to match wits in the catapult competition.
A later king of Syracuse, it is said, persuaded the legendary Archimedes to design advanced catapults for defense against the Romans. In time, the Romans themselves had catapults capable of delivering 60-pound boulders at least 500 feet. A historian in that time described a Roman legion with 160 catapults, some for shooting incendiary missiles and others for rounded stones, lined up in battle alongside archers and slingers.
One aspect of this ancient weaponry that caught Dr. Cuomo's attention was something Hero of Alexander wrote in the first century A.D., which has the ring of the cold war policy of mutual deterrence.
"You didn't just have to have catapults to use them," the historian said in an interview. "You needed your potential enemy to know that you had catapults so they would not attack you in the first place."
Other scholars praised the essay, especially its insights into the close relationship of science and technology in ancient political affairs.
"She's right on target," Adrienne Mayor, an independent scholar in Princeton, said of Dr. Cuomo's thesis. "A lot of people still think of ancient science as something carried out in ivory towers. But war and science are intertwined from the beginning — something military historians have not ignored, but others have."
Ms. Mayor is a classical folklorist whose latest book, "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs" (Overlook Duckworth, 2003), describes biochemical warfare in antiquity, including many instances of catapults that rained fire and pestilence in battle.
Dr. Alex Roland, a historian of technology at Duke University, agreed that at least as early as the fourth century B.C. rulers "kept mathematicians" and set up "what were essentially research and development laboratories," primarily to support military technology. One difference from today, he said, was a conspicuous lack of secrecy in these matters.
"Rulers seemed to promote the technology for immediate payoff for themselves and had not yet worked through the notion that you ought to protect your investment with secrecy and restrictions," Dr. Roland said. "So engineers shopped their wares around, and the information circulated freely among countries."
In fact, Dr. Cuomo said, the ancient engineers "saw themselves as an international community," and Philo mentioned with pride his exchanges with colleagues in cities throughout the Mediterranean basin.
A few other scholars have been studying and writing along similar lines, Dr. Roland noted, citing Dr. John G. Landels, a British historian whose book, "Engineering in the Ancient World," was reissued in 2000 by the University of California Press.
Dr. Cuomo pointed out in an interview that "what historians are doing at a more insider level has not really entered the general public level yet."
Dr. Josiah Ober, a professor of classics at Princeton, said that in the fourth and third centuries B.C. the new technology began stimulating changes in the architecture of defensive fortifications, providing, for example, openings in towers wide enough for catapult-launched projectiles to pass through from the inside. That, too, became the task of engineers who, he said, worked for "very centralized monarchies pushing military technology."
Dr. Ober suggested that scholars had been slow to recognize the importance of technology in antiquity's hierarchies of power because classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were known for the aristocratic view, he said, that "productive labor was destructive to your capacity to truly live the highest form of life."
The Greeks, who knew their Homer and his celebration of the courage of single-warrior combat, seemed to have deep qualms about the new projectile weapons, as Dr. Cuomo noted in a story of a king of Sparta in the fourth century B.C.
"On seeing the missile shot by a catapult which had been brought then for the first time from Sicily," Plutarch wrote, the king "cried out, `By Heracles, this is the end of man's valor.' "
Archaeological evidence indicates that catapults may be as old as ninth-century B.C. Nimrud in what is now Iraq. Some of the first crude instruments had large bows drawn back with winches for firing. They evolved into heavier timber frames with pulleys and iron levers by which hair or sinew cords were wound tightly as torsion springs for greater power and range.
So awesome was catapult technology that by the first century A.D. the Roman engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus allowed pride to blind him to human nature and ingenuity. The invention of these machines of war, Frontinus wrote, "has long ago been completed, and I don't see anything surpassing the state of the art."
