Archimedes and the Roman Imagination (review)

Mary Jaeger, who teaches at the University of Oregon, and who has already published an excellent book, Livy's Written Rome (Ann Arbor 1997), in her new book now examines the most important passages in Latin authors that contain brief mentions, anecdotes, and aphorisms on Archimedes. For the most part they are found in Cicero, Livy, and Vitruvius, but Jaeger does not hesitate to refer when necessary also to Greek sources, such as Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Athenaeus, and the late Byzantine author Tzetzes.

Jaeger interprets the testimony on Archimedes' life and death as an important part of the confluence of east and west in the third and second centuries b.c., when a large part of the Mediterranean world was conquered militarily by Rome, although Greece still affirmed its own high culture.

The first part of the book divides into three substantial chapters. The first, The "Eureka" Story, praises Archimedes as "an intellectual athlete" and makes him the protagonist of a "primal scene of discovery, one that sets physical limitations against mental freedom, permanence against impermanence, and the world of the senses against the world of ideas" (31).

The second chapter, "Cicero at Archimedes's Tomb," interprets this rediscovered site "as a place where he [sc. Cicero] attempts to overcome the divide between the living and the dead" (150). This tomb became emblematic of the entire humanistic tradition. It is appropriate that the illustration on the dust jacket is a portrait of Cicero by Benjamin West (1738–1820, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a enthusiastic traveler in Italy), in which Cicero in a white toga points out the tomb to the citizens of Syracuse as "a symbol of knowledge neglected and lost by its original owners" (48). Cicero, even though I do not believe that he read Archimedes directly, is our earliest source for his life, and "did more than anyone to create him as a literary figure" (151).

The third chapter, "Why Two Spheres?," takes up the arrival in Rome of two planetary spheres which were taken as war booty by the general Marcellus: "instead of offering an image of Archimedes himself, he [sc. Cicero, who records this event in De Republica] presents vivid images of Romans discovering, displaying, and manipulating artifacts associated with him. . . . The images of the two spheres is emblematic of Cicero's way of casting the Roman appropriation of Greek cultural capital as both inheritance and rediscovery" (67–68), a testimony of great significance for "the transfer of cultural capital from one people to another and from one generation to the next" (152).

The second part of Jaeger's book concentrates on the question "Who killed Archimedes?" (ch. 4), in which she discusses the passage in book 14 of The Punic Wars, in which Silius Italicus seems to celebrate Marcellus's mercy toward the conquered (93–94). Unfortunately, Jaeger cites neither the article by Marco Scaffai on Marcellus and Archimedes in Silius' Punica (Paideia 69 [2004] 483–509), nor Lorenzo Braccesi's "L'assassinio di Archimede," Hesperìa 22 (2008) 161–66, where the absentmindedness of the scientist and the silliness of the soldier are explained as a later invention, in order to justify a barbaric act, planned and commissioned in such a way that Archimedes is unable to offer his services to Hannibal at a time when he was Rome's greatest enemy.

Chapter 5 treats "The Defense of Syracuse," and in a coda discusses an epigram of Claudianus (Carmina minora 51) in which Archimedes' sphere "evokes from the god both laughter (risit) and a statement endorsing Archimedes' brilliance, just as the siege engines at Syracuse did from Marcellus. Claudian's poem thus takes up the humor in Polybius and Plutarch and the idea of ridicule in Livy" (126). In Part 3 (chapter 6), "Petrarch's Archimedes," she investigates in quite an original way the symbolic values found in Archimedes by Petrarch in his De viris illustribus and Rerum memorandarum libri, in which Archimedes is...