---
Title: Catapult (1858)
Description: Engels’s short article on the ancient war engine.
Author: Friedrich Engels
Date: 1858-02-18
URL: https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/originales/1858%20Catapult
---


*Written by Frederick Engels about February 18, 1858, and published unsigned in* The New American Cyclopaedia. A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge*, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, vol. IV (New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1858), p. 558. Text of the Cyclopaedia, from the public-domain scans in the Internet Archive (newamericancycl10danagoog, University of Wisconsin copy, collated with the University of Michigan copy, newamericancycl19danagoog), with the OCR corrected against the page images; collated paragraph by paragraph with the German version in Marx/Engels,* Werke*, vol. 14 (Berlin, 1961), p. 265, and found complete. The breaks that the Cyclopaedia marks with a dash inside the article are given as new paragraphs.* [Traducción al español](https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/1858%20Catapulta)

**CATAPULT** (Gr. *κατα*, against, and *παλλω*, to hurl), an ancient military engine for throwing stones, darts, and other missiles, invented in Syracuse, in the reign of Dionysius the elder. It acted upon the principle of the bow, and consisted of wood frame-work, a part of which was elastic, and furnished with tense cords of hair or muscle. Catapults were of various sizes, being designed either for field-service or bombardments. The largest of them projected beams 6 feet long and weighing 60 lbs. to the distance of 400 paces, and Josephus gives instances of their throwing great stones to the distance of ¼ of a mile. The Romans employed 300 of them at the siege of Jerusalem. From the time of Julius Cæsar it is not distinguished by Latin authors from the *balista*, which was originally used only for throwing masses of stone.