of the island again. As his ship left the island, he turned and, foreshadowing the Punic Wars, said to his companions: "What a wrestling ground we are leaving, my friends, for the Carthaginians and the Romans." While his army was being transported by ship to mainland Italy, Pyrrhus' navy was destroyed by the Carthaginians at the Battle of the Strait of Messina, with 98 warships sunk or disabled out of 110. After Pyrrhus of Epirus landed on Mainland Italy, his Roman opponents had mastered up a large army under Roman consul Manius Curius Dentatus, while he was still Tyrant of Sicily. After Pyrrhus was defeated at the Battle of Beneventum (275 BC) by the Romans, he decided to end his campaigns against Southern Italy, and return to Epirus, resulting in the loss of all his territorial gains in Italy. The city of Tarentum however still remained under Epirote control. The ancient historian Diodorus Siculus who wrote and recorded the monumental works of manuscripts about universal world/human history called Bibliotheca historica, and the ancient Doric-Greek revolutionary scientist, inventor and mathematician Archimedes who anticipated modern calculus, and analysis by applying methods of infinitesimals and exhaustion to rigorously derive and prove the range of geometric theorems, and invented the innovative Archimedean screw, compound pulleys, and defensive war machines to protect his native town of Syracuse from invasions, were both born, grew up in, lived and died in Sicily. Middle ages As the Roman Empire was falling apart, a Germanic tribe known as the Vandals along with an Iranian tribe known as the Alans took over Sicily for a relatively brief period beginning in 440 AD under the rule of their king Geiseric, forming the Kingdom of the Vandals. The Vandals and Alans gained a monopoly on the Mediterranean grain trade during their monarchical reign, with all grain taxes being monitored by them. Due to the Western Roman Empire being too preoccupied with war in Gaul, when the Vandals & Alans started invading Sicily in 440, the Romans could not respond. Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II sent a failed expeditionary force to deal with them in 441, which ended in a Vandal-Alan counter-victory. However, they soon lost these newly acquired possessions, except for one toehold in Lilybaeum, to Odoacer (an Arian Christian Barbarian statesman & general of possible East Germanic & Hunnic descent, and client king under Zeno whose reign over Italy marked the