This great inventor did other things which struck the imagination of the men amongst whom he lived, for of some of them they had never seen the like before. During the siege of Syracuse by the Romans, in 212 B.C., Archimedes invented marvellous war-engines: strange grappling hooks which, it was said, could seize an enemy's ship and overturn it in the sea, and he showed the Syracusans how to set up a water pump in their ships, so that should water get into the hold, it could be pumped out and the ship saved from sinking. He is also said to have made some arrangement of mirrors and burning {406} glass by means of which the Roman ships were set on fire. But in spite of all these inventions, the Romans took the city, and Archimedes was killed. He was found by a Roman soldier, sitting in his house and paying no heed to any danger, but intent on drawing mathematical diagrams on the ground. Looking up and seeing the enemy, all he said was: "Stand away, fellow, from my diagram." The soldier, not knowing who he was, killed him. IV. THE END OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE AND THE POWER FROM THE WEST It is said that on his deathbed Alexander bequeathed his empire "to the strongest," but there was no one general able enough or strong enough to succeed him, and for about fifty years after his death, his empire was torn by strife and bloodshed. At last some kind of peace and order was restored, but the one great empire of Alexander had disappeared, and the civilized world was broken up into a number of independent states, of which the most important were the Kingdoms of Syria, Egypt and Macedonia. During the long wars which had preceded this settlement, many battles had been fought on Greek soil. The Greeks were not strong enough to prevent this and neither were they able to maintain their independence when Macedonia became a kingdom. She was too powerful and strong a neighbour and Greece fell under her rule. Tyrants were established in the Greek cities, a deep humiliation to the freedom-loving Greek. {407} But once more the old Greek spirit flared up and the tyrants were driven out. From time to time in the history of Greece, states had joined together in various leagues and alliances, but the inability of the Greeks to combine for long, even when their very life demanded it, had prevented such leagues from lasting any great length of time. But in 281 B.C. when once again the independence of Greece was threatened, one of these old leagues was revived, the Achaean League. It lasted for nearly a century and is of the greatest interest to modern times, for until the union of the American states, about two thousand years later, there was nothing in the history of the world like it again.