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With regard to scorpiones, catapults, and ballistae, likewise with regard to tortoises and towers, I have set forth, as seemed to me especially appropriate, both by whom they were invented and in what manner they should be constructed.
As in all these cases motion is obtained by means of right lines at the centre and by circles, so also farm waggons, travelling carriages, drums, mills, screws, scorpiones, ballistae, pressbeams, and all other machines, produce the results intended, on the same principles, by turning about a rectilinear axis and by the revolution of a circle.
I have now spoken of the principles applicable to the parts and proportions of catapults. Ballistae are constructed on varying principles to produce an identical result. Some are worked by handspikes and windlasses, some by blocks and pulleys, others by capstans, others again by means of drums.
The era is computed variously...." After having given a short account of the different coinages and currencies, which is interesting, but of which the various localities are left to the imagination, he writes: "The natives of Central India make use of the ballistae, and those machines which we call bombardas, also other warlike implements adapted for besieging cities.
They also obtain possession of a rising ground; and having collected thither catapultae and ballistae, so that they might have a fort in the city itself, commanding it like a citadel, they surround it with a wall: and the Saguntines raise an inner wall before the part of the city which was not yet taken.
So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers. Music, also, the architect ought to understand so that he may have knowledge of the canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune ballistae, catapultae, and scorpiones to the proper key.
He explained the principles of the borer as follows: that the machine itself resembled the tortoise, but that in the middle it had a pipe lying between upright walls, like the pipe usually found in catapults and ballistae, fifty cubits in length and one cubit in height, in which a windlass was set transversely.
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