Alexander : a history of the origin and growth of the art of war from ...

work.MOUNDS AND TOWERS. 175From this niouud, when completed, the ditch coukl befilled up and the walls could be demolished with batteringramsand other devices. The besiegers had the advantageof the mound for their engines, whereas the engines of theenemy were usually on the ground inside the walls of thetown, whence their aim was by no means so accurate. Butoften mounds of equal size were built inside by the besiegedto get a better chance for their fire. The rapidity with whichthese mounds could be thrown up to an extraordinary heightis most astonishing, even when we consider that the wholearmy worked at them, and that often the entire population ofthe surrounding district was pressed into the service. Cassarmade a mound at Avaricum in twenty-four days, which waseighty feet high and three hundred and thirty feet wide, andhad towers at each side. Sylla is said, at the siege of Masada,to have made a mound two hundred and eighty-six feethigh, and to have surmounted it by structures one hundredand fifty-five feet higher. These figures may possibly failsomewhat of accuracy. They sound exaggerated even whenwe remember the walls of Babylon. But the enormous sizeof these structures is well established.Instead of mounds, towers alone were often built, as theycould be more quickly constructed. The size of these seemsequally fabulous. They are said to have been sometimestwenty stories in height, and the ordinary towers had tenstories. The carpentry in them must have been wonderful.Each story was filled with armed men, and had loopholesfrom which these could shoot missiles at the besieged on thewalls. These towers rested on a number of wheels, verybroad and solid, and required many hundred men to movethem. Demetrius Poliorcetes, at Rhodes, according to Diodorus,had one made by Epimachus of Athens, which wasseventy-five feet square, one hundred and fifty feet high, and