Other stories cast him as a military magician, a warrior-scientist / one-man death squad. According to these legends, when his home city of Syracuse was under siege by the Romans in 212 BCE, Archimedes—by then an old man, around seventy—helped defend the city by using his knowledge of pulleys and levers to make fantastical weapons, “war engines” such as grappling hooks and giant cranes that could lift the Roman ships out of the sea and shake the sailors from them like sand being shaken out of a shoe. As Plutarch described the terrifying scene, “A ship was frequently lifted up to a great height
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