They also made sallies both night and day, whenever occasion offered, set fire to the siege engines, slew many of their assailants, and undermined the Romans' mounds by removing the earth through tunnels driven under the wall. As for the battering-rams, sometimes they threw ropes around them and broke them off, sometimes they pulled them up with hooks, and again they used thick planks fastened together and strengthened with iron, which they let down in front of the wall and thus fended off the blow of still others.
Edition :
Dio's Roman History. Cassius Dio Cocceianus. Earnest Cary. Herbert Baldwin Foster. William Heinemann, Harvard University Press. London; New York. 1914-.