Marcus Claudius Marcellus
Marcus Claudius Marcellus was consul five times, the last Roman to win the spolia opima by killing an enemy king with his own hand, the general who first held Hannibal to a draw at Nola and was called the sword of Rome to Fabius's shield, and the man who besieged Syracuse for two years against the machines of Archimedes, took it, gave orders that the old man be spared, and wept when a soldier killed him. He was born about 270 BC, fought in the First Punic War as a young man, and in 222 as consul met the Gallic king Viridomarus at Clastidium, killed him in single combat, and carried the armour to the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, the third and last time in Roman history that was done. After Cannae he was the one commander the senate trusted. He held Nola against Hannibal three times between 216 and 214, small actions that showed the army Hannibal could be faced, and the Sicilian command followed. Syracuse had gone over to Carthage after Hiero II's death, and Marcellus attacked it by land and sea in 213 with sixty quinqueremes and a siege tower on lashed ships. The catapults, cranes and claws Archimedes had built for Hiero broke the assault, Polybius says, until the Romans would not go near the wall for fear of a plank with a rope on it, and Marcellus settled down to blockade. He got in by a party over the wall during a festival in 212, took the plateau, and starved the island citadel out that autumn; the city was sacked, Archimedes died, and the statues and paintings Marcellus shipped to Rome were, Plutarch says, the first Greek art the Romans had seen and the beginning of their taste for it. The senate gave him an ovation rather than a triumph, since the war was not over, and the Sicilians complained of him for years. He went back to Italy, fought Hannibal to a standstill in Apulia, took Salapia, and in 208, consul for the fifth time and sixty years old, rode out to reconnoitre near Venusia with a small escort and was killed in a Numidian ambush. Hannibal, who had wanted him dead for six years, gave him a funeral.
- Lived: 270 BCE – 208 BCE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: general, consul, statesman
