Database: War machines

Pericles, the Athenian politician, appears to have been the first Greek to use "siege engines" during the Peloponnesian War. These included "rams", "turtles" and towers. To burn down fortresses, the Greek historian Thucydides said that some of his contemporaries would have used iron tubes filled with hot coals, sulfur, and pitch in order to launch flaming projectiles at the walls. The invention of the gastraphetes at the end of the Classical period, the ancestor of the catapult and the crossbow, eventually played an important role by having a greater range than an archer.