Archimedes and the Roman Imagination

Introduction: The "Life of Archimedes"

INTRODUCTION: THE “LIFE OF ARCHIMEDES”
in the first chapter of his disser tation on Archimedes, published in 1879 as Quaestiones Archimedeae, Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg methodically sets forth a narrative biography of the great mathematician.1 The information about the lives of all the ancient mathematicians is meager and widely scattered, says Heiberg, but we know more aboutArchimedes than the others for two reasons: his defense of Syracuse, which drew the attention of historians; and his pr actice of pr efacing his t reatises w ith lett ers t o his friends. Having identified these t o strands of evidence, Heiberg constructs his narrative by bringing together material from both. Before doing so, however, Heiberg points out that Eutocius’s commentary on The Measurement of the Circle referred to an ancient biog raphy of Archimedes by one Heracleides. This piece of information leads to a dead end, for we know nothing more about this biog raphy or the biog rapher himself. Indeed , Heiberg has to justify calling him “Heracleides,” because Eutocius calls him “Heracles” elsewhere.2 This life of Archimedes (probably called simply
Αρχιµδους β ος, “Life of Archimedes”) would have taken the shape imposed on it b y its author’s interests, prejudices, and understanding of how a “life” was supposed to be written. From our knowledge of Hellenistic biography , we can conjecture that it was pr obably more descriptive than narrative; that is, it probably focused on character more than event and included “anecdotes , witticisms, and eccentricities,” precisely the kind of material, indeed, that the literary tradition has preserved about Archimedes, material familiar to many moderns in the for m of the “Eureka” story and the statement “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.”3 Heiberg presses on, through Archimedes’ possible dat e of birth in 287 BCE, his relationship to the Syracusan royal family (sources for the latter of which are Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus and Archimedes’ own letter to Gelon, which prefaces his Sand-Reckoner), his stay in Egypt, his amazing machines, his theoretical interests (symbolized by the sphere and cylinder on his tomb, which, Heiberg notes, was neglected and lost by the Syracusans and rediscovered by Cicero), his defense of Syracuse against Roman attack, his death during the sack of the city, and the grief of the Roman general Marcellus at learning of it. In both t ext and not es, Heiberg is careful to make clear that his narrative is a compilation of information from sources that vary in reliability : when giving Archimedes’ date of birth, he adds, si Tzetzae credimus (if we believe Tzetzes); a parenthetical ut videtur (as it seems), qualifies his sta ement that Archimedes spent a long time in E gypt; and he pronounces entirely false any assertions that Archimedes traveled to Spain.4 Heiberg’s footnotes , most of them quoting his sour ces verbatim, are twice as long as the biography itself. In short, his life of Archimedes is a model of judicious reconstruction , careful documentation, and restraint in interpretation.5 More recent scholars take it for granted that readers will understand the constructed nature of this narrative, which, for convenience, I shall call the “Life of Archimedes.”6 In volume 1 of his Works of Archimedes, Reviel Netz does not even include a biography and says that perhaps one ought not be att empted.7 Netz’s comment makes good sense, for to all appearances, the legends comprising much of this “Life of Archimedes” have at best a tenuous relationship to the reality of Archimedes’ life; and the moder n historian of science has other, more rewarding, questions to ask.8 Having noted the “radically different” strands of tradition about Archimedes, Netz brackets the anecdotes , looks instead to Archimedes’ letters and treatises, and, eschewing narrative, demonstrates how the man’s personality emerges from his work.9 When he discusses ancient mathematicians in general, in The Shaping of Deduction in G reek Mathematics and in his essa y “Greek Mathematicians: A Group Picture,” Netz demonstrates what can be lear ned about their lives by taking a demographic approach to information gleaned from the treatises and the corpus of ancient commentary.10 This approach allows Netz to make several claims about the field as a whole he argues for the “catastrophic,” as opposed to incremental, origins of Greek mathematics; the rarity of mathematicians ; their generally privileged origins; and the position of mathemati2 ARCHIMEDES AND THE ROMAN IMAGINATION [18.221.146.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...