Archimedes and the Roman Imagination

5. The Defense of Syracuse

chapter 5 THE DEFENSE OF SYRACUSE
cast as the story of Marcellus receiving the news, the “Death of Archimedes ” plays a r ole in the ar istocratic competition for g lory in r epublican Rome: any thug can kill an unarmed old man, but it takes greatness of character to recognize and commemorate the virtues of an enemy who represents the acme of Greek genius.The“Death of Archimedes,” like the story of the spheres, also demonstrates a shift in the power to evaluate intellect, for in commanding that Archimedes be saved and then mour ning and burying him, the Roman pronounces judgment on the Syracusan. The various texts that together make up the tradition of the defense of Syracuse tell the story of the beginning of this interaction between exemplary Greek and exemplary Roman. In doing so, they appear to have neatened up the past considerably, for there are no traces of Archimedes having any direct contact with a Roman until one kills him,and there are no traces of any Roman being aware of his existence until Rome attacks Syracuse during the Second Punic War.1 Such intact purity appears even more unreal when we recall that the siege of Syracuse took place late in Archimedes ’ long life, one spent for the most par t in a cit y that was for decades a loyal Roman ally.2 We can infer from this tidiness that the several writers who comprise the tradition have been at work here shaping this story in their own interests and that both the pr istine nature of Archimedes’ Hellenism and the novelty of Rome’s contact with his genius are important to those interests.3 This chapter attends primarily to Plutarch, who tells of the defense of Syracuse in greater detail than anyone else and whose v ersion meaningfully links several features that appear separately in the others.4 Plutarch, in turn, 101 provides a lens through which to view in retrospect Polybius’s incomplete account and Livy’s less detailed one. Although Plutarch describes the Roman siege and capture of Syracuse in his Life of Marcellus, the central figu e in his account is not the attacking Marcellus but the defending Archimedes. Moreover , Plutarch digresses twice from the main nar rative of the attac k, into what I call the “Life of Archimedes,” and he at one point dig resses from that into a pocket history of the science of mechanics.5 According to Plutarch (Marc. 14.6–14), Marcellus sailed up to the walls of Syracuse, confident in his p wer and reputation, but this po wer and reputation failed to intimidate Archimedes or his machines. These machines, says Plutarch, beginning a digression, were “by-works” (πρεργα), because Archimedes was more interested in pure geometry than in mec hanics. There follows a history of mechanics, which traces the subject bac k through Archytas and Eudoxus to Plato, who was outraged that anyone would use a mechanical method of geometric proof. This is why, says Plutarch, mechanics was distinct from philosophy and categorized under the military arts.Yet, Plutarch continues , Archimedes wrote Hieron that with a given force (τ*η
δοθε σ*η δυνµει), it was possible to move any given weight (τ3 δοθ ν βρος); he even claimed that if he had another world, he could go to it and move this one (ε7
πεν ;ς, ε7 γη
ν ε7
χεν 8τ/ραν, κ νησεν =ν τα,την µεταβς ε7ς κε νην)—the earliest version on record of his famous e xpression “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.”6 When Hieron asked for a demonst ration of a g reat weight moved by a small force, Archimedes loaded a big ship w ith cargo and launched it by means of a compound pulley. Impressed, Hieron asked Archimedes to design defense engines for Syracuse. Plutarch’s nar rative returns to the ac count of the attac k w ith a fairly detailed descr iption of how Archimedes’ eng ines—catapults, beams that dropped heavy rocks, grappling irons, and small catapults called “scorpions ”—warded off the Romans (15.1–17.4), until the fear that the S yracusans had felt as the Romans approached crossed over to the Romans, who became terrified at seeing a ything they took to be a sig n of Archimedes’ presence. On recognizing that Archimedes’ engines were getting the bett er of him, Marcellus made a joke about his situation (17.1–2) and decided to besiege the city instead of continuing to try to take it by assault. A second digression points out once again...