Oops

[stoutfellow]

The following passage from Polybius somehow strikes me funny. "He" is King Philip of Macedonia.

"[H]e came before daybreak to Meliteia, and placing scaling ladders against the walls, attempted to take the town by escalade. The suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack so dismayed the people of Meliteia, that he would easily have taken the town; but he was baffled by the fact of the ladders proving to be far too short."

(Polybius spends the next section pointing out how stupid this was.)

Comments

[jsburbidge]

Apparently the mechanisms for determining a wall's height from a distance based on trigonometry for this sort of purpose were fully developed only in the late Middle Ages / early Renaissance (see The Invention of Science, Wootton, Harper, 2015)

[stoutfellow]

I'll have to take a look at that; it sounds interesting.

In any case, Polybius does think that Philip could and should have gotten it right: "For what can be more culpable than to arrive at a town which they mean to carry, in an entirely uprovided state, without having taken the precaution of measuring walls, cliffs, and the like, by which they intend to effect their entrance?"