Need some information about Mantinea 207 BCE

[Paullus Scipio]

Duncan wrote:-

I know it's hard to believe, but even Homer nods.

..Oh, I'm aware that the 'Gods have feet of clay', to coin another phrase, :wink: and that the normally meticulous Marsden is occasionally in error.
For example he says that Alexander's torsion powered stone-throwers were only used against personnel at Halicarnassus...whereas Arrian specifically tells us (in relation to a brick secondary wall) "..on the following day Alexander brought up his siege artillery to attack it.." and earlier, artillery in the towers "...from which to bombard the defenders of the wall.." and "..artillery and battering rams for breaching the defences.."
Again, the stone-throwers were used against a sortie "..the catapults mounted on towers kept up a continuous pressure by hurling heavy stones.." , but contra Marsden, we are not told their target, and they would not have been throwing stones into a mixed Infantry melee, hock: but rather at the enemy arrow-shooters firing in support from the city walls ( as anyone who thinks about it for two seconds would realise)

If you try to envisage the scene, the men are dropping rocks on the Macedonians from above. There is no need to outrange javelins

..."dropping"?...so you envisage a cliff-like scenario, then ( so why does Polyaenus say 'ridges', not 'cliffs'?)...what are the Macedonians doing marching up to a cliff, and where did the fleeing Phocians go?. This is no Thermopylae! we are told 'a crescent shaped mountain/hill' with ridges. This is special pleading, Duncan, and very unlikely....no hint of it in the source.....I'll take your line from the 'Roman recruits' thread !! ( and trust the source until proven otherwise )

you must somehow get around the design flaw (inherent particularly in stone-projectors) that, shooting downhill, the missile doesn't wait for the bowstring! It starts to slip away itself.

...easy to see you are no practising artillerist, Duncan ! How do you think mortars on top of a hill fire at attackers at the base ? (to take an extreme example) Your objection only holds if the stone throwers are trying to reach the base of a wall or cliff, which we must rule out because the source tells us otherwise....

I'm sure nobody would ever have imagined that Onomarchus' stone-throwers were anything other than men dropping rocks from their vantage point above the Macedonians.

...but as we can see, that's not at all what the source says!...you have to put a lot of 'spin' on to come up with that interpretation... And even if we were to ignore this anecdote, there is the separate 'evolutionary' evidence in Biton's technical treatise...

A pretty good reason would be that they didn't exist at the time.

... a rather too categorical statement given that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence! We are here dealing with the evolution of artillery, as Marsden recognised. To say that stone- throwers didn't exist then is tantamount to saying non-torsion stone throwers came after torsion ones, a logical absurdity ( like saying australo-pithecus came after cro-magnon man!) :o

Your evidence for non-torsion stone-throwing bow-machines comes from a writer who may have been writing at any point between 238 BC and 133 BC, so we don't really know when Charon or Isidorus built their machines.

...just because Biton was writing a history of machines from years gone by, without telling us exactly when, doesn't mean they can't be roughly dated on internal evidence from their structure..

so we don't really know when Charon or Isidorus built their machines.

...but Marsden, on internal evidence which I find altogether very convincing was able to deduce that Isodorus' large stonethrower must date to before 315 B.C. aprox ( and probably much earlier), and Charons smallish stone-thrower earlier still - possibly 375-350 B.C.

Also, we don't know what size of missiles they used, because Biton doesn't tell us.

.....But , as with all catapults the projectile size can be determined from the size of the parts, thus Marsden was able to determine that Charon's machine probably threw a stone around 5 lbs, and Isidorus' machine perhaps as much as 40 lbs!...And clearly a fully-developed "forty pounder" didn't just spring into existence - it must have been preceded by smaller machines, which would fit in between Charon's early stone-thrower and Isodorus' giant. On evolutionary grounds, both those machines, especially Charon's one, were in existence at the time !

Anyone who wants to see stone-projecting catapults at this early date really has to come up with some evidence. Because, so far, there isn't any.

...other than (so far) Polyaenus' anecdote and the very evolution of catapult artillery itself, which Marsden convincingly argues ( even if he did add the word 'machines' to the anecdote in error)......as against evidence for "dropped" stones by hand...pure unsubstantiated supposition based on zero evidence ! ( I'll let you try to refute your own argument on sources...what's sauce for Vegetius, is sauce for Polyaenus ! ) :wink: :wink: