A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE GREEK-ROMAN REPEATING CATAPULT

An “automatic” repeating weapon used by the Roman army is presented. Firstly a short description is shown of the working principle of the torsion motor that powered the Greek-Roman catapults. This is followed by the description of the reconstructions of these ancient weapons made by those scientists who studied repeating catapults. The authors then propose their own reconstruction. The latter differs from the previous ones because it proposes a different working cycle that is almost automatic and much safer for the operators. The authors based their reconstruction of the weapon starting from the work of previous scientists and on their own translation of the original text (in ancient Greek) by Philon of Byzantium .