Archimedes and the Roman Imagination (review)

What classical scholar is not familiar with one or more anecdotes of Archimedes' life? Few will not be able to recall the story of how this Greek mathematician invented a method for determining the volume of an object with an irregular shape while taking a bath and, excited by his new discovery, took to the streets naked crying, "Eureka!" Few will be ignorant of how Archimedes single-handedly repelled Marcellus' attack on Syracuse with his war engines and eventually was killed by a Roman soldier during the sack of the city while still working on one of his theorems. Yet, classicists' acquaintance with and interest in Archimedes does not seem to go much beyond this summary knowledge of these few anecdotes.

For all his intellectual brilliance, Archimedes is a marginal figure in classical studies. He is a sort of outsider in a field that for a long time has been (and still is) largely interested in those historical characters who neatly fit one of the two following categories: writers (e.g., poets, historians, philosophers, orators) and statesmen. It is one of the great merits (but surely not the only one) of Jaeger's new book to have brought Archimedes to the forefront of classical studies. To be sure, Jaeger does not attempt to write a new biography of this Greek mathematician and inventor or to ascertain the historicity of the tradition about Archimedes. As she rightly points out, what we know about Archimedes' life is meager, anecdotal, and has, at best, a tenuous relationship to the reality of Archimedes's life. Rather, in her book, she traces the biography of the figure of Archimedes from the Hellenistic age through late antiquity and up to its rediscovery by Petrarch. In this journey, she uses the figure of Archimedes as represented by various Roman and Geek authors as a sort of hermeneutic tool which gives insight not into the real man but rather into the works of those authors who contributed to the creation of such a figure. She does not simply extract the stories which form the "Life of Archimedes" from the narrative contexts in which they appear. She returns these stories to their contexts and examines their rhetorical function within those contexts. The figure of Archimedes is particularly apt for this kind of study. As her work reveals, Archimedes is not simply a powerful symbol of intellect in the ancient world but also a key topos for discovery who shapes the way Greek and Roman authors present themselves as thinkers. The figure of Archimedes, defender of the Greek city of Syracuse and eventual victim of Roman violence, provides a focal point for ideas about Greco-Roman interactions, the nature of Roman empire, and the empire's relationship to Greek culture.

Not everyone will agree with every reading offered by Jaeger in her new book. For example, I was not completely persuaded by Jaeger's argument that Vitruvius has Archimedes intentionally resemble the stock character of the servus currens in his description of Archimedes' joyous running in the "Eureka story" and that "Archimedes' procession through the city could have been read by first century Romans as a comic version of a victory lap, one casting Archimedes as slave and Hieron as master" (28). However, Jaeger's idea to analyze the figure of Archimedes as a way of exploring cultural liminality is brilliantly original, and, in her hands, the story of Archimedes tells us a fascinating story about discovery and rediscovery and the process of cultural appropriation and transmission in the ancient world.

The book is divided into three main parts. Part 1 examines the multiple accounts of some of the most famous anecdotes of the "Life of Archimedes," namely, the so-called "Eureka Story," Cicero's discovery of Archimedes's neglected tomb when quaestor of Syracuse, and the story of the two spheres, one solid, one orrery, made by Archimedes and brought to Rome by Marcellus after the capture of Syracuse. Jaeger's narratological approach, which draws heavily on Genette...