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siege to some Gaulish fort thrown together with logs, I can tell you that! We’ll never ram our way in, never bring down the wall with catapults.”
    “But the walls can be breached, nonetheless?”
    Vitruvius smiled. “How much do you know about laying sieges, Gordianus? That son of yours must have learned a thing or two campaigning with Caesar up north and editing his memoirs.”
    “My son and I usually talk of other things when we meet.”
    He nodded. “I’ll tell you about sieges then. The main virtues of the besieger are patience and perseverance. If you can’t crash or burn your way in, you must burrow like a termite. The sappers will have all the glory in this siege. They’re the ones who dig, burrowing under the walls. Burrow far enough, and you’ve got a tunnel into the city. Burrow deep and wide enough, and a section of wall comes crashing down under its own weight.”
    “It sounds almost too simple.”
    “Far from it! It takes as much thoughtful engineering and hard labor to bring down a city as it does to build one. Take our situation here. Caesar chose this spot for a camp because it’s high up. Not only can you see the city and the sea beyond, but you have a clear view of the siege-works going on in the valley just below us. That’s where the real action is. Right now it’s too dark, the valley’s all in shadow, but come dawn you’ll be able to see what we’ve accomplished down there.
    “The first step in any siege is to dig a contravallation—that’s a deep trench parallel to the city walls protected by screens. That allows you to run men and equipment back and forth. Our contravallation runs all along that valley down there, from the harbor to our left, all the way over to the smaller inlet to our right, on the other side of the city. The contravallation also protects the camp from the city; prevents the enemy from pouring out of the gates and mounting a counterassault against us. At the same time, it hinders anyone beyond the camp from running fresh supplies into the city. That’s important. Hunger is everyman’s weakness.” He ticked his fingers, reciting a list. “Isolation, deprivation, desperation, starvation: no battering-ram can match the power of those.
    “But to mount an assault, you need to wheel your towers and siege engines right up to the walls. If the ground isn’t level—and it’s certainly not level in that valley down there—you’ve got to make it so. That’s why Caesar ordered the building of a massive embankment at a right angle to the wall, a sort of elevated causeway. It took a lot of leveling before we could lay the foundation; you’d think we were building an Egyptian pyramid from the amount of earth we’ve moved. The embankment is made mostly of logs, stacked up and up and up, each level perpendicular to the one below, with earth and rubble packed into the interstices to make it solid. Where it cuts across the deepest part of the valley, the embankment’s eighty feet from top to bottom.
    “All the time this digging and building has been going on, the Massilians have kept firing on us from the walls, of course. Caesar’s men are used to fighting Gauls, who’ve got nothing bigger than spears and arrows and slingshots. It’s another game altogether with these Massilians. The hard fact is, though I hate to admit it, their artillery is superior to ours. Their catapults and ballistic engines shoot farther and shoot bigger. I’m talking about twelve-foot feathered javelins raining down on the men while they’re trying to stack heavy logs! Our usual protections—movable shields and mantlets—were totally inadequate. We had to build lean-tos all along the embankment to protect the workers, stronger than any such structures we’d built before. That’s what I love about military engineering—always a new problem to solve! We built the lean-tos from the stoutest wood we could find, armored them with pieces of timber a foot thick, and covered everything