From [[The Tyrants of Syracuse by Jeff Champion]]: I made a lot more progress on this during Max's dinner and got some really fascinating information about Mediterranean siege warfare. Evidently the oldest record of siege engines comes from the [[Mesopotamia|Assyrians]] and Carthage learned about it from their eastern territories, which used to belong to [[Assyria]]. This will be super useful for [[Civil Mage|Civil Mage]], because this chapter was all about military engineers in [[classical antiquity]]. There was also some really awesome stuff in there about how [[Greek]] polities were usually conquered by internal betrayal due to class warfare, not effective sieges. Often armies would ravage the countryside, which was effective at starving a city and forcing them to fight, as most people in a polity were farmers who lived beyond the city walls rather than necessarily being city-dwellers. Phillip II of Macedon and a few others were famous for essentially saying that they took more cities with gold and sweet words than the sword, which is super relevant to the idea that [[Valentia]] and diplomacy were responsible for several of the [[Lysaria|Lysarian League]] city-states joining the League. ^b21cf4